2025 Franz Steiner Prize awarded to Nadine Klopfer
27.05.2025
On May 10, 2025, GHI Washington Deputy Director Axel Jansen together with Johannes Klemm of the Steiner Verlag awarded the biennial Franz Steiner Prize in Transatlantic History at the Annual Conference of the Historians of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS) in Tutzing. The Steiner Prize is awarded by the GHI Washington and the Steiner Verlag for an outstanding work in transatlantic and North American history.
This year's winner is Nadine Klopfer (LMU München) for her manuscript "Trade and Taste: French Things and the Making of the American Nation, 1780s–1820s." At a time when the U.S. once again is distancing itself from Europe politically, it is perhaps of particular interest to explore the old continent’s relevance to the evolution of American nationhood. Dr. Klopfer’s work provides a new and exciting angle for approaching transatlantic cultural relations. Informed by anthropologists’ and art historians’ longstanding interests in cultural objects, she deftly posits that we have failed to grasp how the elites in early American culture found succinct ways to begin to define national cultural coordinates. In doing so, urban middle-class and upper-class Americans responded to the desire to not be British, on the one hand, and to set standards of cultural refinement and elite integration, on the other.
Dr. Klopfer describes her book as a “cultural history of French things in the post-revolutionary United States.” She tells the stories “of gold watches, mahogany chairs, and silverware, of Sèvres porcelain vases and Empire couches, of fans, snuff boxes, and ribbons.” By focusing on the networks that made these objects available to but also cherished among American elites, including presidents such as George Washington and James Monroe, she draws a rich picture of transatlantic exchanges. While she emphasizes her contribution to the historiography of the Early Republic, which has long focused on contemporary discourses about the American nation, the implications of her study will inspire researchers well beyond this particular subfield.
The prize committee consisted of colleagues from Europe and from North America, all of whom were immensely impressed by Dr. Klopfer’s achievement. Committee members touted, in particular, her deft construction of the manuscript, her meticulous research, and her elegant explication of the early-nineteenth-century American fascination with artefacts either from France or at least regarded as “French.” They appreciated not only Dr. Klopfer’s demonstration of how elite Americans began constructing a more refined national culture, but also of how French things served as foils against which they sought a sense of national identity based upon ideals of straightforwardness and transparency. By the 1820s, this enthusiasm for French things had become part of a broad project of national cultural definition. The committee highlighted how the manuscript, by focusing on objects, their networks, and their social significance, opens exciting new perspectives on a seemingly well-researched period.
The GHI is proud to note that Dr. Klopfer’s research was supported by a GHI postdoctoral fellowship. The manuscript will soon be published in the Steiner Verlag book series Transatlantic Historical Studies, and will be available in Open Access Gold.
