Faculty

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.”

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.