Anca Parvulescu, the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature and professor of English in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2023 René Wellek Prize for best monograph from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).
Parvulescu shares the award with sociologist Manuela Boatcă, head of school in the Global Studies Program at the University of Freiburg, Germany, with whom she co-wrote “Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires.” Published by Cornell University Press, the book places Liviu Rebreanu’s novel “Ion” (1920), generally considered the first Romanian-language modern novel, at the center of a wide-ranging exploration of modernity, migration and imperial entanglements.
Read a Q&A with Parvulescu from Arts & Sciences.
The René Wellek Prizes recognize outstanding books in the discipline of comparative literature. Winners were announced during the ACLA’s 2023 annual meeting, which took place in March in Chicago. In its unanimous prize citation, the jury noted that “‘Creolizing the Modern’ formulates a rich methodological exemplar of looking again and differently at ‘small places’ — and even perhaps at not-so-small places with the small places always in sight — to understand global movements — cultural, political, economic.”
For more information, visit acla.org.
