PrizesThe Center for Cultural Analysis announces the winners of two new prizes.

 

Preetha Mani is the winner of the first annual CCA Early Career Research Prize.  The prize supports the publication of a first book by a junior faculty member at Rutgers-New Brunswick. Professor Mani is an Assistant Professor of South Asian Literatures in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and a member of the core faculty in the Program in Comparative Literature.  She specializes in twentieth-century Hindi, Tamil, and Indian-English literatures. Her book is titled The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method.  It is currently under review at Northwestern University Press. The Idea of Indian Literature positions Indian literature as a field of comparative literature rather than a stable corpus of texts. Exploring Hindi and Tamil fiction, criticism, and autobiographies, the book chronicles the emergence of the short story as a preeminent genre in twentieth-century Hindi and Tamil literature, challenging the presumption that the novel is the Ur-genre of nationalist writing.  

Carla Cevasco is the winner of the first annual CCA Early Career Book Prize.  The prize supports a symposium on a first book written by a junior faculty member at Rutgers-New Brunswick.  Professor Cevasco is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Executive Director of the New Jersey Folk Festival. Her book in progress, under contract with Yale University Press, is Violent Appetites: Hunger, Natives, and Colonists in the Northeastern Borderlands. The book offers a history of hunger within the context of negotiations between Native Americans and English and French colonists in northeastern North America from 1630 to 1770.  Professor Cevasco argues that throughout decades of borderlands warfare, hunger simultaneously destroyed and reinforced cultural and social boundaries.  Treating a variety of sources from missionary accounts and captivity narratives to medical texts, cookbooks, and sermons, Violent Appetites documents the precariousness of settler’s lives as they navigated an unfamiliar landscape without knowledge of how to endure hunger. Simultaneously, it highlights the sophisticated strategies that Native peoples employed to resist the colonization of their food supplies.

 


The Center for Cultural Analysis is pleased to announce a $1000 prize for a first monograph on the humanities, humanistic social sciences, or fine arts. 

  • Any full-time NTT or tenure-track faculty member at Rutgers-New Brunswick is welcome to apply.
  • To be eligible, the submission must be a single-authored scholarly book with a publication date between January 1, 2021 and January 1, 2023.
  • Self-nominations are welcome, as are nominations by department chairs. Please submit a PDF of the published book (if available) or proofs (if not), along with a cover letter giving your contact details.

Application packet submissions can be facilitated digitally using the following link: https://rutgers.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_089hFcZLogOIzmm

Deadline: December 31, 2022. Please direct any questions to Leah Price, Acting Director of the CCA via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..