Edyta M. Bojanowska of Rutgers University to Receive MLA Prize

[Alex Rudd]

Dear SEELANGS list members,

The Modern Language Association (“MLA”) has asked me to pass along the
announcement below.  Please note that the recipient of the referenced
prize, Edyta Bojanowska, is one of our own here on SEELANGS.  Should
you have any questions about the MLA itself or about this or any of
its prizes, you can write to Rosemary Feal at awards at mla.org.

- Alex, list owner of SEELANGS

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MLA AWARDS ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR SLAVIC LITERARY STUDIES
TO EDYTA M. BOJANOWSKA FOR NIKOLAI GOGOL: BETWEEN UKRAINIAN AND
RUSSIAN NATIONALISM; ANDREW KAHN RECEIVES HONORABLE MENTION


New York, NY - 1 December 2009 - The Modern Language Association of
America today announced it is awarding its eighth Aldo and Jeanne
Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures to
Edyta M. Bojanowska, of Rutgers University, for her book Nikolai
Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism, published by Harvard
University Press. Andrew Kahn, of the University of Oxford, is
receiving an honorable mention for his book Pushkin's Lyric
Intelligence, published by Oxford University 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 is one of eighteen awards that will be presented on 28
December 2009 during the association's annual convention, held this
year in Philadelphia. The members of the 2009 selection committee were
Gabriella Safran (Stanford Univ.); Barry Scherr (Dartmouth Coll.),
chair; and William Mills Todd III (Harvard Univ.). The committee's
citation for the winning book reads:

“Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism contains a
major new interpretation of one of Russia's most difficult writers. As
the subtitle indicates, Edyta M. Bojanowska does not place Gogol in
one tradition or the other but instead, in a series of carefully
nuanced analyses, discusses how his writings contributed to both
Ukrainian and Russian nationalist models. She traces in fine detail
the development of his ideas and in the process sheds light on works
by Gogol that have generally received less attention from critics.
Equally at ease in presenting theories of nationalism and in carrying
out close textual readings, Bojanowska has produced a study that will
have a lasting influence on future Gogol scholarship.”

Edyta M. Bojanowska is an assistant professor of Russian and
comparative literature at Rutgers University. She specializes in
nineteenth-century century Russian prose. She received her PhD from
Harvard University, where she was also a junior fellow at the Society
of Fellows and a lecturer in Slavic languages and literatures. Her
articles have appeared in journals such as Russian Review, Slavic and
East European Journal, and Canadian Slavonic Papers. She has given
numerous presentations, most recently at the conferences of the
American Comparative Literature Association and of the American
Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She is currently
working on a manuscript entitled “Imperial Nationalism and Russian
Culture.”

The committee’s citation for the honorable mention reads:

“Andrew Kahn has produced an extremely erudite study of Pushkin's
lyrics, in which he explores and elucidates the intellectual context
for these works. Very well read in the contemporary scholarship on
English and continental Romanticism, he reveals the extent of
Pushkin's profound engagement with the literary and cultural movements
of his day. The volume is imaginatively organized around a set of
themes that shed light on how Russia's greatest poet formed and
developed his ideas about such matters as the role of inspiration in
creativity, the classical and the Romantic, the question of commercial
success for the artist, concepts of the hero, and the confrontation
with mortality.”

Andrew Kahn is university reader in Russian at the University of
Oxford, fellow at Saint Edmund Hall, and lecturer at Queen's College.
He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Pushkin and translator
of Nicolai Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveler. His articles have
appeared in journals such as Stanford Slavic Studies, Révue des Études
Slaves, and EMF and books such as Remapping the Rise of the European
Novel and Self and Story. His research interests include travel
literature, Enlightenment Russia in its European context, and the
history and theory of translation in Russia (1700-1840).

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; honorable mention was given to
Monika Greenleaf. In 1997 the award went to Alexander M. Schenker. In
1999 the award was given to Harriet Murav. The award in 2001 was given
to Gabrielle Safran. In 2003, it was given to Irina Sirotkina. In
2005, the award went to Vladimir E. Alexandrov; honorable mention was
given to Harsha Ram. The most recent award, in 2005, was given to
Julie A. Buckler; Olga Matich received an honorable mention.

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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