|
MLA AWARDS WILLIAM RILEY PARKER PRIZE FOR ARTICLE IN
PMLA TO ENRIQUE GARCÍA SANTO-TOMÁS
New York, NY - 1 December 2009 - The Modern Language Association of America today announced the winner of its forty-sixth annual William Riley Parker Prize for an Outstanding Article Published in
PMLA, the association's journal of literary scholarship. The author of this year's winning essay is Enrique García Santo-Tomás, a professor at the University of Michigan. His article, "Fortunes of the
Occhiali Politici in Early Modern Spain: Optics, Vision, Point of View," appeared in the January 2009 issue of PMLA.
The William Riley Parker 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 selection committee were Elaine Freedgood (New York Univ.); Rubén
Gallo (Princeton Univ.), chair; Julia Reinhard Lupton (Univ. of California, Irvine); Mildred Mortimer (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder); and Jennifer Summit (Stanford Univ.). The committee's citation for the winning article reads:
In "Fortunes of the
Occhiali Politici in Early Modern Spain," Enrique García Santo-Tomás uses the metaphor of political lenses to analyze the interplay between science and literature in seventeenth-century Spain. In his erudite and insightful discussion, the author analyzes
the role of optics in early modern Europe, tracing the development of a series of inventions that include Venetian glass, mirrors, lenses, and prisms into metaphors for seeing well and knowing all, and offers a new reading of the Spanish classic
El diablo cojuelo. His article is a model for comparative scholarship: theoretically informed, supported by insightful close readings and archival research, and eloquently argued.
Enrique García Santo-Tomás is professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of
La creación del 'Fénix': Recepción crítica y formación canónica del teatro de Lope de Vega, winner of the 2001 Premio Moratín de Ensayo a la Investigación Teatral;
Espacio urbano y creación literaria en el Madrid de Felipe IV, awarded the 2005 Premio de Investigación Villa de Madrid; and
Modernidad bajo sospecha: Salas Barbadillo y la cultura material del siglo XVII. He is the editor of
El teatro del Siglo de Oro ante los espacios de la crítica: Encuentros y revisiones, Cervantismos americanos, Espacios domésticos en la literatura áurea, and has prepared critical editions of works of Lope de Vega, Tirso
de Molina, and Salas Barbadillo. In addition, he has authored two poetry collections:
Retorno a Ítaca and
Las verdades del arce. He currently writes for the literary pages of the Spanish newspaper
ABC. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883) promotes the advancement of 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 flagship journal of the association, 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 MLA's oldest award, the prize for an outstanding article in
PMLA was first presented in 1964. In 1968 the prize was named in memory of a distinguished former editor of the journal and executive secretary of the association, William Riley Parker. Recent winners have been Henry Staten (1998), Phillip Novak (1999),
Rita Felski (2000), Ian Baucom (2001), Geoffrey Sanborn (2002), Anne Mallory (2003), Rolf J. Goebel (2004), Bill Brown (2005), Lorraine Piroux (2006), Pauline Yu (2007), and Nergis Ertürk (2008).
The William Riley Parker Prize is awarded under the auspices of the MLA's Committee on Honors and Awards. Other awards sponsored by the committee are 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 Studies in Slavic 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.
William Riley Parker (1906-68) was executive secretary of the MLA and editor of
PMLA from 1947 to 1956. In 1959 he was elected to serve as the MLA's sixty-ninth president. Internationally known as the founder and director (1952-56) of the MLA's Foreign Language Program and author of major studies and essays about foreign language
education in the United States, Parker was a scholar of English literature and author of major books and articles on Milton and other British poets and writers. At the time of his death in 1968 he was Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of
English at Indiana University, Bloomington. |
|
