Professor Benson Taylor Receives Modern Language Association Prize

Professor Melanie Benson Taylor is a co-winner of the first Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection for The Cambridge History of Native American Literature.

The committee's citation reads:

Melanie Benson Taylor's colossal, field-defining The Cambridge History of Native American Literature brings together nearly three dozen prominent and upcoming literary and visual arts scholars, poets, and fiction writers to explore rich and rewarding intersections between Native American literary culture and performance, media, Black, Canadian, feminist, and queer cultures. The contributions also speak to political and aesthetic concerns across the genres of poetry, drama, and speculative and horror fiction. This capacious volume critiques as much as it expands the field's purview of teleological history. Bringing the entire enterprise fully up-to-date is the volume's sophisticated exploration of contemporary implications of the tension between Indigenous digital interventions in colonialist culture and the concept of "digital indigeneity" or digital Natives.