Faculty

Music scholar Seth Brodsky takes the momentous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as an opportunity to re-evaluate modernism through psychoanalysis and music in his first book, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017), which received the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society for 2018. Every year the Lewis Lockwood Award honors a musicological book of exceptional merit published during the previous year by scholars in the early stages of their careers. “In studying and analyzing the events of the remarkable year 1989, Seth offers a wholly new and exciting way of thinking about modern music,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities.

Imagination, personal experience, and lucid prose complement the in-depth research and stealthy dose of satire in Severance, Ling Ma’s debut novel, which just received the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction. Expanded from what originally began as a short story, her book was selected from 1,193 books published during the past year. Each winning author of the Kirkus Prize receives $50,000 and widespread renown in the book publishing world.