William Riley Parker Prize


The William Riley Parker Prize is the oldest award given by the Modern Language Association, the principal professional organization in the United States and Canada for scholars of language and literature. The Parker Prize is awarded each year for an “outstanding article” published in PMLA—the association's primary journal, and widely considered the most prestigious in the study of modern languages and literatures. It was first awarded in 1964 to David J. DeLaura, then a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, for his article, “Arnold and Carlyle,” which had been published in the March 1964 issue of PMLA.
In 1968, the prize was named for former PMLA editor and MLA Secretary William Riley Parker. Parker, a professor at Indiana University, was a Milton biographer whose scholarship also considered the formation of literary studies in the United States.

Notable winners

Previous winners of the prize have included Fredric Jameson, Walter Ong, and Pauline Yu. Only two scholars have won the award multiple times. Elisabeth Schneider of the University of California at Santa Barbara, received the award in 1966 and 1973.. George T. Wright of the University of Minnesota received the award in 1974 and 1981.
The prize has only twice been awarded for an article published by a scholar still in graduate school. David Wayne Thomas, now an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, was awarded the prize for an article he published while a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. Thomas's article, "Gödel's Theorem and Postmodern Theory," appeared in the March 1995 issue PMLA. More recently, Gordon Fraser was awarded the prize for "Troubling the Cold War Logic of Annihilation," an article published in the May 2015 issue of PMLA. Fraser, now a faculty member at the University of Manchester, was at the time a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Connecticut.
Scholars from the University of Virginia have won the award the greatest number of times, having received the prize in 2000, 1997, and 1979, and having received an honorable mention in 1969.

List of William Riley Parker Prize Winners{{Cite web|title = William Riley Parker Prize Winners Modern Language Association|url = https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/MLA-Honors-and-Awards/Winners-of-MLA-Prizes/Annual-Prize-and-Award-Winners/William-Riley-Parker-Prize-Winners|website = www.mla.org|accessdate = 2015-11-20}}

2019
Kamran Javadizadeh, Villanova University, for "The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject"
Honorable mention: Edgar Garcia, University of Chicago, for “Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich”
Honorable mention: Laura E. Helton, University of Delaware, Newark, for “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading”
2018
Katherine Fusco, University of Nevada, Reno, for “Sexing Farina: Our Gang’s Episodes of Racial Childhood”
Honorable mention: Eric Calderwood, University of Illinois, Urbana, for “Franco’s Hajj: Moroccan Pilgrims, Spanish Fascism, and the Unexpected Journeys of Modern Arabic Literature”
Honorable mention: Ricardo Matthews, California State University, Fullerton, and University of California, Irvine, for “Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory”
2017
Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University, for “Primitive Passions, Blinding Visions: Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Mystique’ and a Tradition of Mystical Ekphrasis”
Honorable mention: Irene Siegel, Brooklyn, New York, for “A Judeo-Arab-Muslim Continuum: Edmond Amran El Maleh’s Poetics of Fragments”
2016
Yasser Elhariry, Dartmouth College, for “Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sufi Poets, and the New Francophone Lyric”
2015
Gordon Fraser, University of Connecticut, Storrs, for “Troubling the Cold War Logic of Annihilation: Apocalyptic Temporalities in Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”
2014
Christopher Cannon, New York University, for “From Literacy to Literature: Elementary Learning and the Middle English Poet”
Honorable mention: John Levi Barnard, College of Wooster, for “Ancient History, American Time: Chesnutt’s Outsider Classicism and the Present Past”
2013
Margaret Ronda, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for “‘Work and Wait Unwearying’: Dunbar's Georgics”
2012
Tobias Menely, Miami University, Oxford, for “‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper's Task and the Time of Climate Change”
2011
Toral Jatin Gajarawala, New York University, for “Some Time between Revisionist and
Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature”

2010

Paul Benzon, Temple University, for “Lost in Transcription: Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad Book, and the Standardization of Error”
2009
:es:Enrique García Santo-Tomás|Enrique García Santo-Tomás, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for “Fortunes of the Occhiali Politici in Early Modern Spain: Optics, Vision, Points of View”
2008
Nergis Ertürk, Pennsylvania State University, for "Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar's Hasret, Benjamin's Melancholy"
2007
Pauline Yu, American Council of Learned Societies, for "'Your Alabaster in This Porcelain': Judith Gautier's Le livre de jade"
Honorable mention: Joseph R. Slaughter, Columbia University, for "Enabling Fictions
and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law"
2006
Lorraine Piroux, Rutgers University, for "The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture"
2005
Bill Brown, University of Chicago, for "The Dark Wood of Postmodernity "
Honorable mention: Feisal G. Mohamed, Texas Tech University, for "Confronting Religious Violence: Milton's Samson Agonistes"
2004
Rolf J. Goebel, University of Alabama, Huntsville, for "Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problems of Historical Authenticity"
2003
Anne Mallory, University of Georgia, for "Burke, Boredom, and the Theater of Counterrevolution"
Honorable mention: Paul Giles, University of Oxford, for "Transnationalism and Classic American Literature"
2002
Geoffrey Sanborn, Bard College, for "Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment"
2001
Ian Baucom, Duke University, for "Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies"

2000

, University of Virginia, for "Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class"
1999
Phillip Novak, Le Moyne College, for "'Circles and Circles of Sorrow': In the Wake of Morrison's Sula"
1998
Henry Staten, University of Washington, for "Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case of Hunger of Memory"
1997
Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia, for "The Wound of History: Walcott's Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction"
1996
Lawrence Lipking, Northwestern University, for "The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism"
Honorable mention: Ann Louise Kibbie, Bowdoin College, for "Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana"
1995
David Wayne Thomas, University of California, Davis, for "Gödel's Theorem and Postmodern Theory"
1994
Claire Cavanagh, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for "Rereading the Poet's Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin, and Stalin"
1993
Alan Nadel, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for "God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War 'Epic'"
1992
Edward Hirsch, University of Houston, for "The Imaginary Irish Peasant"
1991
Beth S. Newman, Southern Methodist University, for "'The Situation of the Looker-On': Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights", and David K. Herzberger, University of Connecticut, for "Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain"

1990

William L. Andrews, University of Kansas, for "The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative"
1989
Margaret Waller, Pomona College, for "Cherchez la Femme: Male Malady and Narrative Politics in the French Romantic Novel"
1988
Thomas C. Caramagno, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, for "Manic-Depressive Psychosis and Critical Approaches to Virginia Woolf's Life and Work"
1987
Donald W. Foster, Vassar College, for "Master W. H., R.I.P."
1986
Thomas Hyde, Yale University, for "Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth"
1985
Terry Castle, Stanford University, for "The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative"
1984
A. Kent Hieatt, University of Western Ontario, for "The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay"
Honorable mention: Marshall Brown, University of Colorado, for "'Errours Endlesse Traine': On Turning Points and the Dialectical Imagination"
1983
Paul B. Armstrong, Georgia Institute of Technology, for "The Conflict of Interpretations and the Limits of Pluralism"
1982
Hans Eichner, University of Toronto, for "The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism"
1981
George T. Wright, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, for "Hendiadys and Hamlet"
Honorable mention: Gerhard Joseph, Lehman College, City University of New York, for "The Antigone as Cultural Touchstone: Matthew Arnold, Hegel, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Drabble"
Honorable mention: Marshall Brown, University of Colorado, for "The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach"

1980

Roger W. Herzel, State University of New York, Albany, for "'Much Depends on the Acting': The Original Cast of Le Misanthrope"
1979
David H. Miles, University of Virginia, for "Portrait of the Marxist as a Young Hegelian: Lukács' Theory of the Novel"
1978
Morris E. Eaves, University of New Mexico, for "Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology"
1977
Evelyn J. Hinz, University of Manitoba, for "Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of
Marriage Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction"
1976
R. G. Peterson, Saint Olaf College, for "Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature"
1975
Walter J. Ong, SJ, Saint Louis University, for "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction"
Honorable mention: A. Dwight Culler, Yale University, for "Monodrama and the Dramatic Monologue"
1974
George T. Wright, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, for "The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems"
1973
Elisabeth Schneider, University of California, Santa Barbara, for "Prufrock and After: The Theme of Change"
Honorable mention: Frances W. Weber, University of Michigan, for "Unamuno's Niebla: From Novel to Dream"
1972
R. A. Yoder, Northeastern University, for "Toward the 'Titmouse Dimension': The Development of Emerson's Poetic Style"
1971
Fredric R. Jameson, University of California, San Diego, for "Metacommentary" and "La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism"
Honorable mention: Alan E. Knight, Pennsylvania State University, for "The Medieval Theater of the Absurd"
Honorable mention: Robert Champigny, Indiana University, for "Implicitness in Narrative Fiction"

1970

E. D. Lowry, Dunbarton College of Holy Cross, for "The Lively Art of Manhattan Transfer"
Honorable mention: W. B. Carnochan, Stanford University, for "Satire, Sublimity, and Sentiment: Theory and Practice in Post-Augustan Satire"
Honorable mention: William V. Spanos, State University of New York, Binghamton, for "'Wanna Go Home, Baby?': Sweeney Agonistes as Drama of the Absurd"
1969
Rudolf B. Gottfried, Indiana University, Bloomington, for "Our New Poet: Archetypal Criticism and The Faerie Queene"
Honorable mention: Leon Gottfried, Washington University, for "Death's Other Kingdom: Dantesque and Theological Symbolism in 'Flowering Judas'"
Honorable mention: Jules Brody, City University of New York, for "Don Juan and Le Misanthrope, or the Esthetics of Individualism in Molière"
Honorable mention: L. A. Beaurline, University of Virginia, for "Ben Jonson and the Illusion of Completeness"
Honorable mention: Nina Baym, University of Illinois, for "Fleda Vetch and the Plot of The Spoils of Poynton"
1968
Stanley B. Greenfield, University of Oregon, for "Grammar and Meaning in Poetry"
Honorable mention: Joseph J. Moldenhauer, University of Texas, for "Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe's Aesthetics, Psychology, and Moral Vision"
Honorable mention: Glauco Cambon, Rutgers University, for "Eugenio Montale's 'Motets': The Occasions of Epiphany"
1967
Donald Rackin, Temple University, for "Alice's Journey to the End of Night"
1966
Elisabeth Schneider, University of California, Santa Barbara, for "The Wreck of the Deutschland: A New Reading"
1965
René Girard, Johns Hopkins University, for "Camus's Stranger Retried"

1964

David J. DeLaura, University of Texas, Austin, for "Arnold and Carlyle"
Honorable mention: William M. Manly, Simmons College, for "Journey to Consciousness: The Symbolic Pattern of Camus's L'étranger"
Honorable mention: Isidore Silver, Washington University, for "Ronsard's Reflections on Cosmogony and Nature"