The Modern Language Association of America announced earlier in December it is awarding its thirtieth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Karla Mallette, for her book Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean (University of Chicago Press).

The prize is one of nineteen awards that will be presented on 6 January 2023, during the association’s annual convention in San Francisco. The committee’s citation for Mallette’s book reads: 

At once lyrical, engaged, and profoundly learned, Karla Mallette’s Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean is a thrilling example of the power, appeal, and breathtaking scope of comparatist literary scholarship at its best. In an account distinguished by both poetic force and scholarly ambition, Mallette limns the trajectories of two megalanguages of literary history: Arabic and Latin. These cosmopolitan languages, Mallette shows, function as agents of connectivity and spurs to desire; they detach themselves from time and place even as they create new geographies. Formally and conceptually inventive and infused with vibrancy, this book is a gorgeous testament to the worlding power of language. 

 

Congratulations Karla!