We warmly congratulate Sean Franzel (Missouri), who will be awarded the Modern Language Association of America’s prestigious Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures for his book Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 1780–1850, published in 2023 in Cornell’s Signale series. Franzel shares the 2022-2023 prize with Kate Heslop (Berkeley) for Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics, published by Fordham University Press.

The Scaglione Prize is awarded biennially for “an outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of the Germanic languages, including Danish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Yiddish.” The prize will be presented on 10 January 2025, during the MLA’s annual convention in New Orleans. [See list of prize winners on the MLA website.]

The selection committee’s citation for Writing Time reads:

"Behind its deceivingly simple title, Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 1780–1850 unfolds a multidimensional panorama of the forces and contexts—material, technological, cultural-political, philosophical—that shaped early-nineteenth-century literary life in German-language lands. Sean Franzel’s study projects beyond serial literature and seriality, plumbing the narrative organization of both historical thinking and the emergent literary canon of the still-imaginary nation. Through sophisticated and accessible exposition and prose, the book draws attention to the ephemeral, to the material circumstances, and to the elusiveness of completion inherent in the ambitious project of collecting, editing, and possessing literature. Franzel retells German literature’s story in its nascent stage, deftly reading canonical texts while reviving influential but often-overlooked works. In so doing, Franzel succeeds in rekindling readers’ fascination with the ongoing flow of fiction and nonfiction in all their various forms and gestures toward how we may invigorate this fascination in our age."