Bettina Judd, Associate Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, has received an honorable mention for the prestigious William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA). This award, recognizing outstanding scholarly studies of African American literature or culture, acknowledges Judd's significant contribution with her work, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought, published by Northwestern University Press.
According to the MLA awards committee, Judd's work stands out for its unique exploration of the "epistemic value of emotion and sensation." It showcases the role of emotions, including joy, grief, anger, shame, and ecstasy, as "essential guides to liberatory be-ing and identification with human, and interspecies, world making."
In related news, Autumn Womack, Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at Princeton University, was selected as the recipient of the twenty-second annual William Sanders Scarborough Prize for her book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930, published by the University of Chicago Press. An honorable mention was also extended to Irvin Hunt, Helen Corley Petit Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
The William Sanders Scarborough Prize, established in 2001 and named after the first African American member of the MLA, will formally present these awards during the association's annual convention on January 5, 2024, in Philadelphia. For more information, visit www.mla.org.