The Division of Arts & Humanities is proud to announce that Associate Professor of Scandinavian Kate Heslop has been named a co-recipient of the sixteenth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. The prestigious award, presented biennially by the Modern Language Association (MLA), recognizes her groundbreaking work, Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics, published by Fordham University Press.
The MLA prize committee praised Viking Mediologies for its transformative impact, stating:
“The impact of Viking Mediologies: A New History of Skaldic Poetics is profound and multifaceted, undoing long-established scholarly convention about orality and literacy in Germanic medieval cultures, about established poetic and epic historiographies as well as the legacies they unfurled. By reviving the form and materiality of languages, including their multimedia manifestations, Kate Heslop reveals the cultural work of memory in new contexts. Avoiding the trap of any transhistorical definition, Heslop reenvisions medium and mediation in the particular cultural contexts of Scandinavian and Old Icelandic poetics, using close readings to trace striking continuities and eloquently demonstrate how skaldic poems are engaged in intertextual memory. She ultimately delivers the new history promised in the monograph’s title and tells a story that is transformative for the broader fields of media studies and Germanic languages and literatures.”
Professor Heslop shares this honor with Sean Franzel, professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia, whose book Writing Time: Studies in Serial Literature, 1780–1850 was also recognized.
The Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize honors outstanding contributions to the study of Germanic languages, encompassing Danish, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Yiddish. It is one of 23 awards the MLA will present at its annual convention on January 10, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
This recognition highlights Professor Heslop’s dedication to advancing scholarship in Scandinavian studies and UC Berkeley’s ongoing commitment to excellence in the humanities.
For more information about the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize and the full list of recipients, visit the Modern Language Association’s website at www.mla.org.