AU’S BACKSCHEIDER TO RECEIVE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION’S JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL PRIZE

English Professor Paula Backscheider has been named a winner of the 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association of America for her book, “Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre.”
Backscheider and fellow recipient W.J.T. Mitchell of the University of Chicago will be honored Dec. 28 in Philadelphia. The award, named for James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), second president of the MLA, is given annually to an MLA member for the outstanding book that is either a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography.

“Professor Backscheider brings much prestige to the university through her dedicated work in literature,” said Provost John Heilman. “She is the only person to have won the United Kingdom’s British Council Prize for the most distinguished book in the humanities and now the United States' most prestigious award in the humanities.”

The MLA awards committee's citation for Backscheider's book says, " Urging us to defamiliarize, rehistoricize, and reenvision the canons that have excised these works, Backscheider shows us how to read and value a counteruniverse of poetic achievement."

Backscheider, AU’s Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar, specializes in Restoration and Eighteenth Century literature, feminist criticism and cultural studies. Her books include “Daniel Defoe: His Life, Spectacular Politics” and “Reflections on Biography.” She has won two Choice Outstanding Academic Book awards.

She is a former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held fellowships in the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is a member of the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies.

The MLA, which promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies, has 30,000 members in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.