Professor of English Diana Fuss
has been selected to receive the Modern Language Association's James
Russell Lowell Prize, awarded annually for an outstanding book written
by a member of the association.
She will be honored for "The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the
Rooms That Shaped Them," a study of the living and writing spaces of
four well-known authors. Fuss spent eight years doing research for the
book, published by Routledge in 2004, which examines the writing spaces
of Emily Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller and Marcel Proust.
In selecting the volume the MLA said, "This richly generative book
expresses and promotes a capaciousness of thought and mind, grounded by
Fuss’ finely tuned 'sixth sense' and her unmatched capacity to
recognize the power of space in the shaping of the imagination."
Fuss is the third Princeton professor to win the prize in its 36-year
history. The award will be presented at the MLA's annual convention in
Washington, D.C., on Dec. 28.
Fuss has been a faculty member at Princeton since 1988. She received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2001.
