Award News - Heller-Roazen wins MLA's Scaglione Prize

The Modern Language Association has just awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Daniel Heller-Roazen, for his book The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures, and will be awarded at the MLA meeting on December 28th.

The members of the selection committee were Rita Copeland (Univ. of Pennsylvania); Margaret Higonnet (Harvard Univ.), chair; and Sharon Marcus (Columbia Univ.). The committee’s citation for Heller-Roazen’s book reads:
The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation covers a philosophical and literary itinerary of exceptional breadth, a panoply of philosophical and literary works. This ambitious and eloquent study is especially valuable for enriching and renewing the debate on biopolitics. It productively extends a theoretical genealogy that links Derrida, Nancy, and Agamben. Daniel Heller-Roazen writes with seductive grace and love of detail, combining erudition with a gift for scholarly story-telling. But this is also a book with a steely diachronic spine. It moves gracefully from Aristotle’s thought and its legacy in late antiquity to medieval Arabic science and finally to modern thought about consciousness and sensation. The Inner Touch can be recommended to anyone who wants to know about the intellectual history of what we call the aesthetic.

Comments

[Judith Weber]

Congratulations, Daniel!
Love, Judy