James Russell Lowell Prize


The James Russell Lowell Prize is an annual prize given to an outstanding scholarly book by the Modern Language Association.

Background

The prize is presented for a book that is an outstanding literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography.

Eligibility

The Prize is open only to members of the Association.

Notable winners

Past winners of the prize include:
2017 - Deborah L. Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil
2016 - Branka Arsić, Columbia University, for Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
2015 - Caroline Levine, Cornell University, for Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
2014 - Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia, for The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945
2013 - David Rosen, Trinity College, and Aaron Santesso, Georgia Institute of Technology, for The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood
2012 - Sianne Ngai, Stanford University, for Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
2011 - Simon Gikandi, Princeton University, for Slavery and the Culture of Taste
Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University, for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
2010 - Phillip H. Round, University of Iowa, for Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880
2009 - Laura Dassow Walls, University of South Carolina, for The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
2008 - Isobel Armstrong, University of London, for Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880
2007 - Laura Marcus, University of Edinburgh, for The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period
2006 - Martin Puchner, Columbia University, for Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes
2005 - Paula R. Backscheider, Auburn University, for Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre
W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, for What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images
2004 - Diana Fuss, Princeton University, for The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them
2003 - Giancarlo Maiorino, Indiana University, Bloomington, for At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival