The J. Russell Major Prize was established in 2000 by Mrs. Blair Major, in memory of her husband, a distinguished scholar of French history who served on the history faculty at Emory University from 1949 until his retirement in 1990. The prize is awarded annually for the best work in English on any aspect of French history.

2023
Sara E. Black, Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century (McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press)

2022
Sarah C. Dunstan, Race, Rights and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2021
Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell Univ. Press)

2020
Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell Univ. Press)

2019
Venus Bivar, Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (Univ. of North Carolina Press)

2018
Peter Sahlins, 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books)

2017
Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford Univ. Press)

2016
Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard Univ. Press)

2015
Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Harvard Univ. Press)

2014
Arlette Jouanna and Joseph Bergin, translator, The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State (Manchester Univ. Press)

2013
Miranda Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard Univ. Press)

2012
Malick Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2011
Jeremy Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge Univ. Press)

2010
Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford Univ. Press)

2009
Rachel Fuchs, Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press)

2008
Amalia Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Yale Univ. Press, 2007)

2007
Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Harvard Univ. Press)

2006
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Cornell Univ. Press)

2005
Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford Univ. Press)

2004
Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (Scribner)

2003
Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Univ. of Chicago Press)

2002
Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Books)

2001
Debora Silverman, Van Gough and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2000
Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Univ. of Chicago Press)