The Modern Language Association of America today announced that UC Davis English Department Professor Seeta Chaganti is the winner of the twenty-seventh annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies for her book Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 2018). 

 

The Scaglione prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that involves at least two literatures. The prize selection committee describes Professor Chaganti's book as "meticulously researched and highly original" for drawing attention to "the energetic relations between bodies that are manifested and formalized" in the arts of poetry and dance. 

 

"Through her rich and historically grounded readings of medieval and modern works," the prize committee writes, "Chaganti unearths an alternative phenomenology that transcends the confines of specific media and helps us understand varieties of sensory response beyond (and before) modernism’s stark regimentation of the senses."