Congratulations to Julie Buckler and Olga Matich!

[Sibelan E S Forrester]

MLA AWARDS ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR 
STUDIES IN SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES TO 
JULIE A. BUCKLER FOR MAPPING ST. PETERSBURG: 
IMPERIAL TEXT AND CITYSHAPE; OLGA MATICH RECEIVES 
HONORABLE MENTION

New York, NY - 3 December 2007 - The Modern 
Language Association of America today announced 
it is awarding its seventh Aldo and Jeanne 
Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages 
and Literatures to Julie A. Buckler, of Harvard 
University, for her book Mapping St. Petersburg: 
Imperial Text and Cityshape, published by 
Princeton University Press. Olga Matich, of the 
University of California, Berkeley, received 
honorable mention for Erotic Utopia: The Decadent 
Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siècle, published 
by the University of Wisconsin Press. The prize 
is awarded biennially for an outstanding 
scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures 
of the Slavic languages, including Belarussian, 
Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Russian, 
Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, and Ukrainian.  

The prize, which consists of a $2,000 check and a 
certificate, is one of eighteen awards that will 
be presented on 28 December 2007 during the 
association's annual convention, held this year 
in Chicago. The members of the 2007 selection 
committee were Vitaly Chernetsky (Harvard Univ.), 
chair; Gabriella Safran (Stanford Univ.); and 
Barry Scherr (Dartmouth Coll.). The committee's 
citation for the winning book reads:

Julie A. Buckler's Mapping St. Petersburg 
provides fresh and insightful analysis of the 
role of Saint Petersburg in the Russian cultural 
imagination. Buckler brings a breadth of 
scholarship to her investigation of this 
well-studied city, using little-known as well as 
familiar texts and juxtaposing architecture 
knowledgeably with literature. Rather than 
privilege a few leading figures or works, she 
elucidates the complex, seemingly amorphous 
"middle," the ordinary Saint Petersburg that gave 
shape to the ultimate image. Weaving together 
urban legends, travel writing, and high and low 
literature, she creates a rich and illuminating 
cultural geography of Russia's most literary city.

Julie A. Buckler is a professor in the Department 
of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard 
University. She received her PhD from Harvard and 
her BA from Yale University. Her first book, The 
Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial 
Russia, was awarded Best Work of Literary and 
Cultural Criticism for 2000 by the AATSEEL 
Publications Committee. Her essays have appeared 
in journals such as Comparative Literature and in 
anthologies such as Yuri Lotman and Cultural 
Studies and the forthcoming Preserving 
Petersburg: History, Tradition, Memory, and Loss. 
She is the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute 
Fellowship and an Everett Mendelsohn Excellence 
in Mentoring Award from the Harvard Graduate 
Student Council.

The committee's citation for Matich's book reads:

Olga Matich's Erotic Utopia: The Decadent 
Imagination in Russia's Fin de Siècle reveals 
that at the turn of the twentieth century Russian 
writers fantasized about apocalyptic redemption 
achieved through an eroticism that led neither to 
consummation nor procreation. Examining prose, 
poetry, letters, diaries, portraits, and 
philosophical tracts and situating her writers in 
the context of contemporary psychology, Matich 
shows that the vision of erotic utopia intrigued 
not only writers who publicized their 
unconventional love lives (such as Zinaida 
Gippius and Aleksandr Blok) but also Lev Tolstoy 
and the philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev. The result 
is a startling and persuasive tour de force.

Olga Matich is a professor of Slavic languages 
and literatures at the University of California, 
Berkeley. She was previously affiliated with the 
University of Southern California. Her interests 
in Russian modernism and the avant-garde, 
especially its paradoxical utopian 
experimentation with sexuality, the body, and 
gender, are already reflected in her first book, 
Paradox in the Poetry of Zinaida Gippius. Her 
approach to the avant-garde in Russia is 
expressed in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian 
Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, coedited 
with John Bowlt. She organized a major conference 
on Russian émigré literature and edited the 
resulting volume, The Third Wave: Russian 
Literature in Emigration. Her articles have 
appeared in such journals as Slavic Review, 
Russian Literature, and Novoe Literaturnoe 
Obozrenie. She is currently working on a book 
titled Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City and 
collaborating on an accompanying Web site, 
Mapping St. Petersburg.

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest 
American learned societies in the humanities 
(est. 1883), exists to advance literary and 
linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the 
association come from all fifty states and the 
District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, 
Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, 
the association's flagship journal of literary 
scholarship, has published distinguished 
scholarly articles for over one hundred years. 
Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its 
allied and affiliate organizations attend the 
association's annual convention each December. 
The MLA is a constituent of the American Council 
of Learned Societies and the International 
Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies 
in Slavic Languages and Literatures, awarded 
under the auspices of the MLA's Committee on 
Honors and Awards, was presented for the first 
time in 1995. That year's winner was Robert 
Maguire, of Columbia University; honorable 
mention was given to Monika Greenleaf, of 
Stanford University. In 1997 the award went to 
Alexander M. Schenker, of Yale University. In 
1999 the award was given to Harriet Murav, of the 
University of California, Davis. The award in 
2001 was given to Gabrielle Safran, of Stanford 
University. The 2003 award was given to Irina 
Sirotkina, of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 
The most recent award, presented in 2005, went to 
Vladimir E. Alexandrov, of Yale University, with 
an honorable mention going to Harsha Ram, of the 
University of California, Berkeley.

Other awards sponsored by the committee are the 
William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell 
Lowell Prize; the MLA Prize for a First Book; the 
Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. 
Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy 
Prize; the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars; 
the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Morton N. 
Cohen Award; the MLA Prizes for a Distinguished 
Scholarly Edition and for a Distinguished 
Bibliography; the Lois Roth Award; the William 
Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov 
Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies; the 
MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and 
Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural 
Studies; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes 
for Comparative Literary Studies, for French and 
Francophone Studies, for Italian Studies, for 
Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, 
for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a 
Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, 
and for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Endowment Fund was 
established and donated by Aldo Scaglione to the 
MLA in 1987. The fund honors the memory of his 
wife, Jeanne Daman Scaglione. A Roman Catholic, 
Jeanne Daman taught in a Jewish kindergarten in 
Brussels, Belgium. When deportation of Jews began 
in 1942, she helped find hiding places for 2,000 
children. She also helped rescue many Jewish men 
by obtaining false papers for them. Her life and 
contributions to humanity are commemorated in the 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 
Washington, DC.

Aldo Scaglione, a member of the MLA since 1957, 
is Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature 
at New York University. A native of Torino, 
Italy, he received a doctorate in modern letters 
from the University of Torino. He has taught at 
the University of Toulouse and the University of 
Chicago. From 1952 to 1968 he taught at the 
University of California, Berkeley, and from 1968 
to 1987 he was W. R. Kenan Professor of Italian 
and Comparative Literature at the University of 
North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1987 he came to 
New York University as professor of Italian and 
then served as chair of the Department of 
Italian. He has been a Fulbright fellow and a 
Guggenheim fellow, has held senior fellowships 
from the Newberry Library and the German Academic 
Exchange Service, and has been a visiting 
professor at Yale University, the City University 
of New York, and the Humanities Research 
Institute of the University of Wisconsin, 
Madison. In 1975 he was named Cavaliere 
dell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. 
He has been president of the American Boccaccio 
Association and was a member of the MLA Executive 
Council from 1981 to 1984. His published books 
include Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages 
(1963); Ars Grammatica (1970); The Classical 
Theory of Composition (1972); The Theory of 
German Word Order (1980); The Liberal Arts and 
the Jesuit College System (1986); Knights at 
Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from 
Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance 
(1991); and Essays on the Arts of Discourse: 
Linguistics, Rhetoric, Poetics (1998).

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