Olivia DrakeNorman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, has won the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division 2008 award for the best single-volume reference work in the humanities and social sciences. The award was for his 1,200-page collection of translations, French Women Poets of Nine Centuries, published by Johns Hopkins, 2008. The AAP awards prizes in several categories, ranging from the humanities and social sciences to life sciences, physical sciences, and medicine. Shapiro's winning single-volume work, competing against multi-volume works, went on to win as well the overall Award for Excellence in Reference Works.
Joyce Lowrie, professor of romance languages and literatures, emerita, is the author of Sightings: Mirrors in Texts - Texts in Mirrors, published by Rodopi in December 2008. This book analyzes mirror imagery, scenes, and characters in French prose texts, in chronological order, from the 17th to the 20th centuries. It does so in light of literal, metaphoric and rhetorical structures. Works analyzed in the traditional French canon, written by such writers as Laclos, Lafayette, and Balzac, are extended by studies of texts composed by Barbey d'Aurevilly, Georges Rodenbach, Jean Lorrain and Pieyre de Mandiargues. This work offers appeal to readers…
Priscilla Meyer, professor of Russian language and literature, is the author of How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, published in January 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. In How the Russians Read the French, Meyer shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers with specifically Russian aesthetics and moral values. Rejecting French sensationalism and what they perceived as a lack of spirituality among Westerners, these three writers created moral and philosophical works of art that answered French decadence and "desacralization" with…
Norman Shapiro, professor of romance languages and literatures, received the Lewis Galantière Award, given biennially by the American Translators Association (ATA) for a distinguished book-length literary translation into English. Shapiro was honored for his volume of critically-praised verse translations, The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (Illinois, 2008). The wisdom, wit, and elegance of La Fontaine (1621-1695), the preeminent fable-writer since Aesop, made him the universally admired master of the genre. This prestigious award honors one of the ATA's founding members, Lewis Galantière (1894-1977), celebrated for his translations from French drama, fiction, and poetry during the middle decades of…