Prof’s Innovative Scholarly Website Recognized by MLA
December 16, 2022
- Author
- Jay Pfeifer
The website and scholarly resource focusing on Avant Garde artist, poet and entrepreneur Mina Loy, has been recognized by the Modern Language Association.
The lauded, born-digital, open access scholarly website Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, which English professor Suzanne Churchill spearheaded, recently earned another major honor.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) awarded its Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographic, or Archival Scholarship. MLA is the largest, most prestigious organization for literary studies, with 23,000 members from around the world.
The Mina Loy website, co-created by scholars, students and staff at Davidson College, Duquesne University, and University of Georgia, Athens, is the multi-media equivalent of a scholarly book. It shared this year’s MLA prize with Catherine D’Ignatzio and Lauren Klein’s book Data Feminism (MIT Press).
Mina Loy (1882-1996) was an artist, poet, feminist, entrepreneur, inventor and world traveler who consorted with nearly every avant-garde movement, including Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, but was contained by none. The website documents her avant-garde affiliations, pursuing new modes of textual and visual expression in order to invite a closer, more informed engagement with her work.
Churchill began this project in 2014 as a sabbatical investigation, supported by a Boswell Family fellowship, and collaborating with Andrew Rikard ’17 on early prototypes. Susan Rosenbaum from University of Georgia and Linda Kinnahan from Duquesne University joined in as co-principal investigators. Together they applied for and won a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant of $75,000 from the National Endowment for Humanities. In 2021, the project earned an honorable mention for the American Literature Association’s Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities.
