MLA'S Scaglione prize awarded to "Chinese Shakespeares" by Alex Huang

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The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its eighteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Alexander C. Y. Huang, of Pennsylvania State University, for Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, published by Columbia University Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.

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

Alexander C. Y. Huang's Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange maps new territory for the most promising project in comparative literature today. Huang's object is the movement of cultural forms across geographical space, but he regards such movement not as mere diffusion or even as exchange. Instead he examines the way movement across geographical and geopolitical fault lines reaches into cultural forms and changes their meanings from the inside, often revealing possibilities that had lain dormant, unnoticed, or submerged in the texts' cultures of origin. Remarkable not only for its sophistication but also for its scholarly depth, Chinese Shakespeares is a landmark in the renewal of comparative literature as a discipline.

The prize is one of seventeen awards that will be presented on 7 January 2011 during the association's annual convention, to be held in Los Angeles. The members of the selection committee were Nicholas Brown (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago), chair; Carla Freccero (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz); and Alessia Ricciardi (Northwestern Univ.).

Alexander C. Y. Huang is an associate professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University; a research affiliate in literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook; and the vice president of the Association for Asian Performance. He coedited Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace and Class, Boundary, and Social Discourse in the Renaissance; he is also the editor of special issues for the Asian Theatre Journal and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. He is the cofounder and coeditor of two open-access performance archives, Global Shakespeares (http://globalshakespeares.org/) and Shakespeare Performance in Asia (http://web.mit.edu/shakespeare/asia/). Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange also received an honorable mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre.

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 association's flagship journal, 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. 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 Comparative Literary Studies, awarded under the auspices of the MLA's Committee on Honors and Awards, was presented for the first time in 1993. Recent winners have been Leonard Barkan (1999), Marie-Laure Ryan (2000), Victoria Nelson (2001), Ian Balfour (2002), Alessia Ricciardi (2003), Loren Kruger (2004), Evelyne Ender (2005), Toril Moi (2006), Daniel Heller-Roazen (2007), and Sahar Amer (2008). Honorable mentions were awarded to Sharon Marcus (1999), Barbara Fuchs (2001), Avital Ronell (2001), Charles Bernheimer (2002), Barbara Johnson (2003), Susanne Kord (2003), Neil Kenny (2004), and Richard Helgerson (2007).

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 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.

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 later 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).