Awards and Honors
Literature professor receives citation from
Modern Language Association of America
Literature professor Susan Gillman received an honorable mention
from the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) for her
book Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture
of the Occult. She was awarded the certificate in the competition
for the third annual William Sanders Scarborough Prize, given
for outstanding scholarly study of black American literature
or culture. The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American
learned societies in the humanities, promotes the advancement
of literary and linguistic studies.
Gillman's book explores the place of race melodrama in a range
of literary forms and cultural trends during the period from
the end of Reconstruction to World War I. Her MLA citation notes,
“This sophisticated and imaginative study interprets 'race
literature' produced in the late-nineteenth century United States
against the backdrop of a period of crisis and transformation
in global race relations…Blood Talk is certain to
transform radically the ways in which we understand constructions
of race in United States literature at the turn of the century.”
Gillman joined the UCSC faculty in 1986. Her articles have
appeared in such journals as PMLA, American Literary History,
and Critical Inquiry. She is the author of Dark Twins:
Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America and coeditor
of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict and Culture.
Her current projects include "W. E. B. DuBois and the Gender
of the Color Line," coedited with Alys Weinbaum, and "Past
Imperfect/Future Perfect: Grammars of Adaptation in the Americas."
Return to Front Page