Leonid Livak wins Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures
Published: December 18, 2019
Leonid Livak has won the prestigious Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Awarded biennially, the prize celebrates outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of Slavic languages. Livak, a professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of Slavic languages and literature, was recognized for In Search of Russian Modernism, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Calling it a “bold undertaking” and a “model of exemplary scholarship.” the MLA committee commended the work for confronting “inherited assumptions about the field, including its canons and methodologies” for critical analysis.
“The MLA prize is not just a Slavic prize, it’s a general prize in literary studies,” Livak said. “So I'm hoping that this will open the much overdue discussion about how we speak about Russian modernism, the questions we ask about Russian modernism and how it fits within transnational modernist studies.”
