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Pomona
Professor Receives National First Book Award for
Engaging Study of Copyrights
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 Paul
K. Saint-Amour, associate professor of English at Pomona
College, will be awarded the prestigious Prize for a First
Book by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA),
for his work The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and
the Literary Imagination, published by Cornell
University Press.
In his book, Saint-Amour challenges the notion that the
function of copyrights ends with the provision of private
incentives to creation and innovation. The cases he examines
lead him to argue that copyright performs a range of
political, emotional, and even sacred functions that are too
often ignored.
In making its announcement, the MLA’s selection committee
noted that: ““The dazzlingly wide-ranging and engaging study
about the relations between literature and law traces how
copyright has come to be implicated in the circuits of
imperial governance and has served to connect literary
appreciation to the work of mourning. Grounded in rigorous
historical research, this study also speaks pointedly and
eloquently to contemporary concerns about the erosion of the
public domain and public culture."
Established in 1883, the MLA is one of the oldest and
largest American learned societies in the humanities with
more than 30,000 members. Its First Book prize is awarded
annually for the first, book-length publication by a member,
a literary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an
important work or a critical biography. The prize, which is
being awarded for works from 2003, will be presented at the
organization’s annual meeting on December 28, in
Philadelphia.
Saint-Amour latest book project is titled Archive, Bomb,
Camera: Modernism in the Shadow of Total War, about the
bombing of cities during the twentieth-century and how the
reconfiguration of the city as target registers in literary
texts. In addition, he has had articles published in
Comparative Literature Studies,
Diacritics and Nineteenth-Century Literature,
among other scholarly journals and books.
A member of the Pomona College faculty since 1997,
Saint-Amour teaches courses on Victorian, modern British,
and Irish fiction, history and theory of the novel, and
postcolonial literature and theory. In 2000, he received a
Wig Distinguished Professorship Award for Excellence in
Teaching by a vote of the Pomona junior and senior classes.
In the same year, he was awarded a junior fellowship by the
American Council of Learned Societies and a postdoctoral
fellowship from the Society of the Humanities at Cornell
University. Saint-Amour received his B.A. from Yale and his
Ph.D., in English, from Stanford University.
Recent previous winners of the First Book prize have
included: Paul Downes (University of Toronto) for
Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American
Literature, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002; Priya Joshi
(University of California, Berkeley) for In Another
Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in
India, Columbia Univ. Press, 2002; and Bruce W.
Holsinger (University of Colorado, Boulder) for Music,
Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to
Chaucer, Stanford Univ. Press, 2001.
The MLA promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic
studies. Its members 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.
Pomona College, one of the nation’s premier liberal arts
institutions, offers a comprehensive program in the arts,
humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Its
hallmarks include small classes, close relationships between
students and faculty, and a range of opportunities for
student research. Visit Pomona College on the web at
www.pomona.edu.
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