Dr Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Women's Writing, has been awarded the Modern Language Association's prestigious Matei Calinescu Prize for her monograph Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press, 2022). The Prize recognises 'a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth- or twenty-first-century literature and thought.'

The judging committee praised Dr Kennedy-Epstein's work for its groundbreaking subject and method, commenting:

What if the moment of modernist poetry had been named the Rukeyser era rather than the Pound era? Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century persuasively imagines this alternative history. In her audacious book, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein upends the customary single-author study, focusing on the archive of Rukeyser’s unfinished, rebuffed, and disregarded projects. In refreshingly forthright terms, Kennedy-Epstein chronicles an era of patriarchal dismissals and institutional indifference to the intellectual life of women. Rukeyser emerges as a seriously underserved major author, and the unique investigative approach opens up a new perspective on what archival research has to offer. Unfinished Spirit is both an exegesis and a meditation on how to “nourish the process” extolled by Rukeyser, extended here in a work of sympathetic investigation that transforms the way modernism, the twentieth century, the Cold War, and communism are understood.

The book will be celebrated at the MLA 2024 Awards Ceremony, held in Philadelphia on January 5th 2024. 

You can find out about Dr Kennedy-Epstein's work here.