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Crying Words from the Past

‘Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars’ awarded to Andrés J. Nader for ‘Traumatic Verses’: on poetry in German from the concentration camps, 1933-1945


The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its twenty-fifth annual Prize for Independent Scholars to Andrés J. Nader, of Berlin, Germany, for his book Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945, published by Camden House. The prize awards distinguished published research in the fields of modern languages and literatures, including English, and recognizes achievements and contributions of independent scholars. Nader will receive a check for $1,000, a certificate, and a year’s membership in the association.

The MLA Prize for Independent Scholars is one of sixteen awards that will be presented at the association’s annual convention, held this year in San Francisco. The members of the selection committee, appointed by the association’s Committee on Honors and Awards, were Malva E. Filer (Brooklyn Coll. and the Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York); Julie Rak (Univ. of Alberta); Gary Schmidgall (Hunter Coll.), chair; Michael Wyatt (Florence, Italy); and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Univ. of Houston). The citation for Nader’s book reads:

Leading a new generation of students of the Holocaust, Andrés J. Nader persuasively analyzes the psychological needs and motivations behind a broad sampling of poetry composed in the concentration camps. Displaying a strong command of trauma and pain theory, as well as the prior history of Holocaust studies, Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945 illuminates the role of poetry in the camp inmates’ reclamation of the German language and cultural heritage. Offering many poems in English for the first time, in elegant translation, Nader’s anthology and commentary add a significant new dimension to Holocaust studies.

Andrés J. Nader directs a program on the cultures of Holocaust remembrance for the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Berlin. He has taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2006–07), at the University of Rochester (2000–06), and at Binghamton University (1999–2000). He was a Fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2003–04 and an NEH Summer Fellow in 2005. In 1995 and 1996 he was an interviewer for the “Archive of Memory: Interviews with Survivors of the Shoah” at the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam, in cooperation with the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University. He has also published on the representation of the “other” and on oral-history work with survivors of the Shoah. He received his BA from Bennington College in 1991 and his PhD in German studies from Cornell University in 1999.

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. PMLA, the flagship journal of the association, has published distinguished scholarly articles for over one hundred years. Approximately 9,500 members of the MLA and its allied and affiliate organizations attend the association’s annual convention each December. The MLA is a constituent of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures.

The MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, awarded under the auspices of the MLA’s Committee on Honors and Awards, was first presented in 1983. The winners have been Zdzislaw Najder, Gloria C. Erlich, Edward Brunner, Paul van Caspel, Wayne F. Cooper, Keith W. F. Stavely, Harriet Blodgett, Emily W. Sunstein, William Merrill Decker, Marie-Laure Ryan, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Olga Augustinos, Kenneth M. Cameron, Nora Sayre, Graham Robb, Gary Schmidgall, Janet Galligani Casey, Stephen J. Holmes, Joe Snader, David Roessel, Diana Saco, Dana Phillips, Alan Palmer, June Yip, Henry Hitchings, and Eric Paras. Charles Musser, David B. Morris, Carl Hill, Mary Price, and Carolyn Burke have received honorable mention.

Other awards sponsored by the committee are the William Riley Parker Prize; the James Russell Lowell Prize; the MLA Prize for a First Book; the Howard R. Marraro Prize; the Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize; the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize; the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize; the Morton N. Cohen Award; the MLA Prizes for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition and for a Distinguished Bibliography; the Lois Roth Award; the William Sanders Scarborough Prize; the Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies; the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies; and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prizes for Comparative Literary Studies, for French and Francophone Studies, for Italian Studies, for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, for a Translation of a Literary Work, for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, and for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.

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Traumatic Verses