UChicago Professor to Receive the MLA's Prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize
Selecting six distinctive 20th-century women for her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (University of Chicago Press, 2017), UChicago scholar Deborah Nelson examines how each woman responded to suffering in unsentimental ways, and how their unconventional responses reflect their active, expansive, and transformative relationship to the traumas of the 20th century. For her broad look at how their toughness reshaped the cultural landscape, Nelson will receive the 2018 James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association on January 5 in Chicago. "Debbie’s Tough Enough is a highly accessible book that is reaching audiences both within and outside academia,” said Anne Walters Robertson, Dean of the Division of the Humanities at UChicago. “The breadth of its appeal is, in part, what the premiere prize of the MLA honors, and this breadth corresponds to Debbie’s far-reaching impact at the University of Chicago.”