Faculty

UChicago Professor to Receive the MLA's Prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize

Deborah Nelson

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.”

UChicago Professor Wins 2018 Lewis Lockwood Award

Seth Brodsky

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.

UChicago Professor Martha Nussbaum Wins $1 Million Berggruen Prize

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor at UChicago.

The UChicago philosopher and professor Martha Nussbaum will receive the 2018 Berggruen Prize, which is given once a year and carries a cash award of $1 million to a thinker whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world.” She is the author or editor of more than 40 wide-ranging books covering topics such as the place of emotions in political life, the nature of human vulnerability, the importance of liberal education, and the connections between classical literature and the contemporary world.

UChicago Professor Wins 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

Ling Ma receives wide recognition for her apocalyptic novel, "Severance." Photo by Anjali Pinto.

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.

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