FACULTY AWARD: Levy wins Modern Language Association's Prize for a First Book

By Office of Communications on Dec. 2, 2015, 1:42 p.m.

Lital Levy, associate professor of comparative literature, has been awarded the Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for her book "Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine," published by Princeton University Press. The award committee's citation stated: "Using her original translations of primary works, Levy reveals the range of dialectal and interlingual techniques by which Palestinian-Israeli, Sephardi, and Mizrahi writers have cast the experience of alienation, demonstrating in the process how the Zionist embrace of Hebrew as a designated national language has disjointed the Judeo-Arabic tradition." Established in 1993, the MLA Prize for a First Book is awarded annually for the first book-length publication of a member of the association that is a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work or a critical biography. Levy will accept the award on Jan. 9, 2016, during the association's annual convention in Austin, Texas.

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