Matei Calinescu Prize Winners
2022
- Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, University of Bristol, for Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century (Cornell Univ. Press, 2022)
2021
- Katerina Clark, Yale University, for Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943 (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2021)
- Honorable mention: Ada Smailbegović, Brown University, for Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia Univ. Press, 2021)
2020
- Lisa Siraganian, Johns Hopkins University, for Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford Univ. Press, 2020)
- Honorable mention: Daniel Vaca, Brown University, for Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard Univ. Press, 2019)
Please note that books published in 2020 were eligible for this year’s award, as were books published in 2019 but submitted in 2020 while the MLA offices were closed because of the pandemic.
2019
- Jean-Christophe Cloutier, University of Pennsylvania, for Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia Univ. Press, 2019)
- Honorable mention: Ben Conisbee Baer, Princeton University, for Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism (Columbia Univ. Press, 2019)
2018
- Jane Elliott, King’s College London, for The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (Columbia Univ. Press, 2018)
- Honorable mention: George Hutchinson, Cornell University, for Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s (Columbia Univ. Press, 2018)
2017
- Sharon Luk, University of Oregon, for The Life of Paper: Letters and a Poetics of Living beyond Captivity (Univ. of California Press, 2017)
2016
- Jed Rasula, University of Georgia, for History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016)
- Honorable mention: Alex Woloch, Stanford University, for Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016)
2014–15
- Paul K. Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania, for Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015)
- Honorable mention: Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (Columbia Univ. Press, 2015)