The John Gilmary
Shea Prize
The Shea Prize at a Glance
Please be sure to consult the submission rules and the rest of the information on this page for the full award requirements.
What it is:
The Shea Prize honors a book that has made the most “original and distinguished contribution” to the history of the Catholic Church.
What works are eligible:
Any book with a 2023 imprint date.
Awarded:
Annually
Purse:
$1,500
Winner announced:
Fall 2024
Submission instructions:
Complete the online form and have three hard-copy versions of your work available for postal mailing.
About the Shea Prize
The John Gilmary Shea Prize is given annually to the author of a book, published during a preceding twelve-month period, which is judged by a committee of experts to have made the most original and distinguished contribution to knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church.
Any author who is a citizen or permanent resident of the United States or Canada is eligible. The award consists of $1,500.
Prize Committee
Chair
Karin Vélez
Macalester College
Judge
Thomas Kselman
University of Notre Dame
Judge
Charles R. Gallagher, S.J.
Boston College
Submission Rules
The general rules for submission are:
- The book must have been published in 2023.
- The author must be a citizen or permanent resident of the United States or Canada.
- The submitter must send three hard copies of the book as indicated on the submission form.
Past Winners
| Year | Awardee | Work | Publisher | |
| 2024 | Jamie Kreiner | The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction | Liveright Press | Buy |
| 2023 | Jeroen Dewulf | Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians | University of Notre Dame Press | Buy |
| 2022 | Brenna Moore | Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism | University of Chicago Press | Buy |
| 2021 | Theresa Keeley | Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America | Cornell University Press | Buy |
| 2020 | Elizabeth Foster | African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 2019 | Karin Vélez | The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early ModernWorld | Princeton University Press | Buy |
| 2018 | Michelle Armstrong-Partida | Defiant Priests Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya | Cornell University Press | Buy |
| 2017 | William B. Taylor | Theater of a Thousand Wonders: History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain | Cambdrige University Press | Buy |
| 2016 | Katrina Olds | Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain | Yale University Press | Buy |
| 2015 | Maureen C. Miller | Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800-1200 | Cornell University Press | Buy |
| 2014 | John W. O’Malley | Trent: What Happened at the Council | Belknap Press | Buy |
| 2013 | Charles Keith | Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation | University of California Press | Buy |
| 2012 | John Connelly | From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 2011 | Ulrich L. Lehner | Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740-1803 | Oxford University Press | Buy |
| 2010 | Neal Pease | Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland 1914 – 1939 | Ohio University Press | Buy |
| 2009 | John Van Engen | Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages | University of Pennsylvania Press | Buy |
| 2008 | Charles R. Gallagher | Vatican Secret Diplomacy: Joseph P. Hurley and Pope Pius XII | Yale University Press | Buy |
| 2007 | Liam Matthew Brockey | Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 2006 | J. Michael Hayden and Malcom R. Greenshields | 600 Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 1190-1789 | McGill-Queen’s University Press | Buy |
| 2005 | Stephen Schloesser, S.J. | Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris | University of Toronto Press | Buy |
| 2004 | Michael B. Goss | The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany | University of Michigan Press | Buy |
| 2003 | Jay B. Corrin | Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy | University of Notre Dame Press | Buy |
| 2002 | David Burr | Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis | Penn State University Press | Buy |
| 2001 | Katherine Jansen | The Making of Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages | Princeton University Press | Buy |
| 2000 | Brad Gregory | Slavation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 1999 | Kathryn Burns | Colonial Habits: COnvents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru | Duke University Press | Buy |
| 1998 | John M. Howe | Church Reform and Social Change in Eleventh-Century Italy: Dominic of Sora and His Patrons | University of Pennsylvania Press | |
| 1997 | Dauril Alden | The Making of Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540-1750 | Stanford University Press | Buy |
| 1996 | John T. McGreevy | Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North | University of Chicago Press | Buy |
| 1995 | Marvin R. O’Connell | Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis | Catholic University of America Press | Buy |
| 1994 | Brian P. Clarke | Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1859-1895 | Mcgill-Queens University Press | |
| 1993 | Maureen C. Miller | The Formation of the Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950-1150 | Cornell University Press | Buy |
| 1992 | David J. O’Brien | Isaac Hecker: An American Catholic | Paulist Press | Buy |
| 1991 | Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. | The History of Black Catholics in the United States | Crossroad | Buy |
| 1990 | Jeremy Cohen | “Be Fertile and Increase: Fill the Eart and Master It”: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text | Cornell University Press | |
| 1989 | Christopher J. Kauffman, gen. ed. | Makers of the Catholic Community: The Bicentennial History of the Catholic Church in America | Macmillan Publishing | |
| 1988 | James A. Brundage | Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe | University of Chicago Press | Buy |
| 1987 | James M. Powell | Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213-1221 | University of Pennsylvania Press | Buy |
| 1986 | Robert Anthony Orsi | The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1959 | Yale University Press | Buy |
| 1985 | Eugene Franklin Rice, Jr. | Saint Jerome in the Renaissance | Johns Hopkins University Press | Buy |
| 1984 | Philip T. Hoffman | Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789 | Yale University Press | |
| 1983 | Thomas A. Kselman | Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth Century France | Rutgers University Press | |
| 1982 | Walter L. Arnstein | Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdgate and the Nuns | University of Missouri Press | |
| 1981 | John W. Boyer | Political Radialism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897 | University of Chicago Press | Buy |
| 1980 | Richard Krautheimer | Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 | Princeton University Press | Buy |
| 1979 | Kenneth Meyer Setton | The Papacy and the Levant (1204-1571), Vol. II: The Fifteenth Century | American Philosophical Society | |
| 1978 | Charles W. Jones | St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan | University of Chicago Press | |
| 1977 | Timothy Tackett | Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France: A Social and Political Study of the Curés in a Diocese of Dauphiné, 1750-1791 | Princeton University Press | Buy |
| 1976 | Emmet Larkin | The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State, 1878-1886 | American Philosophical Society | |
| 1975 | Jay P. Dolan | The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 | University of Notre Dame Press | Buy |
| 1974 | Thomas W. Spalding | Martin John Spalding: American Churchman | Catholic University of America Press | |
| 1973 | Robert E. Quirk | The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910-1929 | Indiana University Press | |
| 1971 | John T. Noonan | Power to Dissolve: Lawyers and Marriages in the Courts of the Roman Curia | Belknap Press | Buy |
| 1970 | Jaroslav Pelikan | The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition | University of Chicago Press | Buy |
| 1969 | David M. Kennedy | Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger | Yale University Press | Buy |
| 1968 | Robert Brentano | Two Churches, England and Italy in the Thirteenth Century | University of California Press | Buy |
| 1967 | Edward S. Surtz, S.J. | The Works and Days of John Fisher: An Introduction to the Position of St. John Fisher (1469–1535), Bishop of Rochester, in the English Renaissance and the Reformation | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 1966 | Robert I. Burns, S.J. | The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 1965 | Robert I. Burns, S.J. | The Jesuits and the Indian Wars of the Northwest | Idaho Research Foundation | |
| 1964 | John T. Noonan | Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists | Harvard University Press | Buy |
| 1963 | Helen C. White | Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs | University of Wisconsin Press | |
| 1962 | Oscar Halecki | The Millennium of Europe | University of Notre Dame Press | |
| 1961 | Francis Dvornik | The Slav in European History and Civilization | Rutgers University Press | Buy |
| 1960 | John Courtney Murray, S.J. | We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition | Sheed and Ward | |
| 1959 | Maynard Geiger, O.F.M. | Life and Times of Junipero Serra or the Man Who Never Turned Back, 1713-1784 | Academy of American Franciscan History | |
| 1958 | Robert Graham, S.J. | Vatican Diplomacy: Study of Church and State on the International Plane | Princeton University Press | |
| 1957 | John M. Daley, S.J. | Gerogetown University: Origin and Early Years | Georgetown University Press | |
| 1956 | Thomas T. McAvoy, C.S.C. | The Great Crisis in American Catholic History, 1895-1900 | H. Regnery Co | |
| 1955 | John Tracy Ellis | American Catholicism | University of Chicago Press | Buy |
| 1954 | Annabelle Melville | John Carroll of Blatimore: Founder of the American Catholic Hierachy | Scribner Publishing | |
| 1953 | Philip Hughes | The Reformation in England (3 vols.) | Macmillan Publishing | |
| 1952 | Colman Barry, O.S.B. | The Catholic Church and German Americans | The Bruce Publishing Company | |
| 1951 | not awarded | |||
| 1950 | George W. Paré | The Catholic Church in Detroit | Gabriel Richard Press | |
| 1949 | John H. Kennedy | Jesuit and Savage in New France | Yale University Press | |
| 1948 | not awarded | |||
| 1947 | not awarded | |||
| 1946 | not awarded | |||
| 1945 | Carlton J. H. Hayes | Wartime Mission in Spain | Hassell Street Press |