The Modern Language Association of America recently awarded its thirty-first annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book to two recipients: Miya Qiong Xie (Ph.D. ’17), Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative East Asian Literature, Dartmouth College, and Adhaar Noor Desai, Associate Professor of English, Bard College.
Professor Xie received the award for Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia, published by the Harvard University Asia Center. Published in 2023, Territorializing Manchuria was also awarded the First Book Award by Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
“Territorializing Manchuria is a remarkable book that propels the fields of both Comparative Literature and East Asian literature in vital new directions and more firmly establishes comparative modern East Asian literature as a scholarly discipline,” says Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, who was Professor Xie’s primary Ph.D. advisor. “Drawing on sources in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as well as several European languages, Professor Xie astutely analyzes the impact of Manchuria on the formation and problematization of national literatures across East Asia.”
Professor Xie also published Chinese Literature across the Borderlands in a 2021 special issue of Prism, Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, co-edited with David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, and Kyle Shernuk, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at Georgetown University. Prof. Xie received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 2017 and was a Graduate Student Associate at the Fairbank Center while working on her dissertation.
The MLA’s second annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies was awarded to Margaret Hillenbrand, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford, while the honorable mention prize went to Satoru Hashimoto (Ph.D. ’14), Assistant Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature, John Hopkins University.
Professor Hashimoto, who was a 2013-2014 Graduate Student Associate at the Fairbank Center, received the award for Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea, published by Columbia University Press.