The Modern Language Association of America announced it is awarding its eighteenth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Penn State Comparative Literature Professor Alexander C. Y. Huang his for book Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange, published by Columbia University Press. 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.

Professor Huang will be officially presented with this award during the MLA Annual Convention in January 2011. The award selection committee provides the following account of Professor Huang’s book:

“Alexander C. Y. Huang’s Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange maps new territory for the most promising project in comparative literature today. Huang’s object is the movement of cultural forms across geographical space, but he regards such movement not as mere diffusion or even as exchange. Instead he examines the way movement across geographical and geopolitical fault lines reaches into cultural forms and changes their meanings from the inside, often revealing possibilities that had lain dormant, unnoticed, or submerged in the texts’ cultures of origin. Remarkable not only for its sophistication but also for its scholarly depth, Chinese Shakespeares is a landmark in the renewal of comparative literature as a discipline.“

Professor Huang is the cofounder and coeditor of two open-access performance archives, Global Shakespeares and Shakespeare Performance in Asia. Visit our LAUS Announcements blog to find out information about the Global Shakespeare course that is being offered in the spring.  

Congratulations to Professor Huang!  For more details about this award, please visit the Modern Language Association website.