Representations board member Debarati Sanyal was awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship! Find her essay “Calais’s “Jungle”: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance” in issue 139 and “Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism” in issue 79.
Category Archives: Awards and Prizes
Winning Essay
Trisha Urmi Banerjee wins Richard Stein Prize for “Austen Equilibrium”
INCS: Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies has just announced the winner of its Richard Stein Prize for best article published in 2018, Trisha Urmi Banerjee’s “Austen Equilibrium,” published in Representations 143 (Summer 2018).
Reviewers for the prize noted the essay’s “smart, well-structured, interdisciplinary argument and use of game theory” and its engagement with “the under-theorized nature of Austen’s ‘economy of writing.’” One reviewer noted: “I think Banerjee’s reading intervenes in an impressive number of critical conversations (about Austen’s style, narrative time, realism) and cuts across different kinds of methodologies (formal, historical, theoretical), in a clear, compelling, and even exciting way.” Another described how the essay “uses innovative methodologies to take on big ideas and develops them with real clarity and significance.”
Of the essay, Banerjee herself writes: “By proposing a quantitative game-theory model of the marriage plot in Jane Austen’s Emma, the essay demonstrates that free-market moral philosophy underwrites Austen’s representation of matrimony and key formal elements of her writing—particularly, matters of verbal profusion. Her famed stylistic ‘economy’ is revealed to be structured by the emerging capitalist economy that Adam Smith theorized in The Wealth of Nations. Establishing the correspondences among several kinds of economy, the essay unites economic and formal approaches to Austen’s work.”
TRISHA URMI BANERJEE received her PhD in English from Harvard University and is now based in Paris. “Austen’s Equilibrium” derives from her second book project, which uses economic modeling and theory to understand the “economics” of narrative language and structure.
Glebova Essay Wins Prize
Warm congratulations to Aglaya Glebova, whose “Elements of Photography: Avant-garde Aesthetics and the Reforging of Nature” has been awarded the 2018 Emerging Scholar Prize by the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA).
The prize jury praised the essay, calling it “highly innovative in its approach to the interpretation of a famously problematic episode in the career of Aleksandr Rodchenko: the work produced during his visit to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, one of the first Soviet forced labor camps, in the early 1930s.”
AGLAYA GLEBOVA is Assistant Professor in the departments of Art History and Film and Media, as well as the PhD Program in Visual Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently completing a book on Aleksandr Rodchenko and photography under Stalin.
Catherine Gallagher Wins Barzun Prize
The American Philosophical Society has announced that Professor Catherine Gallagher has been selected as the 2018 recipient of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for her book, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction.
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism.
The topic of counterfactual histories has long engaged Catherine Gallagher. In addition to the essays in this new book, her “When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?” was published in the special forum Counterfactual Realities in Representations 98, and “The Formalism of Military History” appeared in our 25th anniversary special issue On Form.
Catherine Gallagher is professor emerita of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founding member of the Representations editorial board. She is the author of many books, including The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel.
Kent Puckett Wins Perkins Prize
Congratulations to Kent Puckett
–whose book Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2016) has won the 2018 Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize is presented annually the society to the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in the preceding year.
Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction provides an account of a methodology increasingly central to literary studies, film studies, history, psychology, and beyond. In addition to introducing readers to some of the field’s major figures and their ideas, Puckett situates critical and philosophical approaches toward narrative within a longer intellectual history. The book reveals one of narrative theory’s founding claims – that narratives need to be understood in terms of a formal relation between story and discourse, between what they narrate and how they narrate it – both as a necessary methodological distinction and as a problem characteristic of modern thought. Puckett thus shows that narrative theory is not only a powerful descriptive system but also a complex and sometimes ironic form of critique.
KENT PUCKETT is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author, in addition to Narrative Theory, of War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945 (Fordham, 2017) and Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008). He serves on the editorial board of Representations, for which he edited the special forum Search (127) and coedited, with C. D. Blanton and Colleen Lye, the special issue Financialization and the Culture Industry (126).
Laqueur’s ‘The Work of the Dead’ wins two prizes
Representations editor Thomas Laqueur wins AHA’s Mosse Prize & McGill’s Cundill Prize for The Work of the Dead
Thomas W. Laqueur, Helen Fawcett Professor of History at UC Berkeley, has been selected as the winner of the George L. Mosse Prize by the American Historical Association and the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature by McGill University. Both honors are in recognition of Laqueur’s book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Calling him a “modern Charon,” the Mosse Prize committee noted:
Laqueur’s haunting book brilliantly tackles a fundamental historical question: how humanity relates to the dead. His magisterial account establishes that throughout the premodern and modern periods, the world has never been disenchanted; the dead have always had agency in defining what it means to be human.
Laqueur will be awarded the Mosse Prize at the AHA’s 131st Annual Meeting in Denver, Jan. 5-8, 2017. In winning the Cundill Prize, Laqueur also receved an award of $75,000.
Algorithms in Culture events
(AP Photo/Google, Connie Zhou)
Supported by a joint grant from Representations and the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society presents a discussion on the topic of “Algorithms in Culture.” At this event, an interdisciplinary faculty working group will share their reflections about the place of algorithms in their disciplines and research. The discussion will take place on Friday, April 29, at 10:30am in 470 Stevens Hall, UC Berkeley. The event inaugurates an ongoing conversation that will be pursued further in a day-long workshop on May 13.
While algorithms are a foundational concept in computer science, there is increasing interest about the roles algorithms play in politics, media, science, organizations, and identity in everyday life. As algorithms become more prevalent and visible in contemporary life, issues around their development and deployment will continue to rise, both in academia and public discourse. In recent years, there has been a growing academic literature taking algorithms as an object of cultural inquiry, as well as many conferences and workshops focused on studying algorithms from a more social scientific or humanistic perspective. In response to this growing approach to algorithms as culture, this interdisciplinary group of scholars will take up algorithms as an object of study in order to examine them as computation, culture and their role in the construction of the self in this event to develop a special section of a journal that explores this topic.
Representations’ Stephen Greenblatt wins 2016 Holberg Prize
Stephen Greenblatt, founding co-editor of Representations and John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, has been named the 2016 Holberg Prize Laureate. The prize, awarded annually by the Norwegian government, is given to a scholar who has made outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social science, law or theology. Previous laureates include Julia Kristeva, Jürgen Habermas, Natalie Zemon Davis, Manuel Castells, Bruno Latour, and Marina Warner.
“His scholarship has had an immeasurable impact on the practices of literary studies, history and cultural criticism, well beyond his own field of expertise,” noted the Holberg Committee. “Greenblatt has provided us a vocabulary through which we can approach the task of understanding our times and its history. His work has been animated by the idea of life as art, and art as revealing something important about life.”
An award ceremony will take place in Bergen, Norway, in June 2016, to honor both Greenblatt as the Holberg Prize Laureate, and Nils Klim Prize laureate, Sanja Bogojević, Senior Lecturer at Lund University.
Breaking News! Yurchak Wins Russia’s Prosvetitel Prize
Congratulations to Representations editorial board member Alexei Yurchak, whose Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation («Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось») has been awarded Russia’s prestigious 2015 Prosvetitel Prize. The English version of the book was published in 2006 and shortly thereafter won the Wayne Vucinic Book Award for best book of the year from the American Society for Eastern European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies. The expanded version, rewritten by Yurchak in Russian and published last year, was one of four books nominated for the Prosvetitel Prize in the humanities.
Yurchak accepts the Prosvetitel Prize in Moscow.
Yurchak’s much talked about “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty” appeared earlier this year in Representations 129.
Alexei Yurchak’s “Everything Was Forever …” Nominated for Russia’s Prosvetitel Prize
Congratulations to Representations editorial board member Alexei Yurchak, whose Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation («Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось») has been short-listed for Russia’s prestigious 2015 Prosvetitel Prize. Published in Russian last year, the book was first published in English in 2006, and shortly thereafter won the Wayne Vucinic Book Award for best book of the year from the American Society for Eastern European, Eurasian, and Slavic Studies.
Yurchak’s much talked about “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty” appeared earlier this year in Representations 129.