The Charles Bernheimer Prize Citations 2017
2017 Prize Winner:
This year's Bernheimer Prize Award for Best Dissertation by a Graduate Student in Comparative Literature goes to Kristin Ann Dickinson of the University of California, Berkeley, for her dissertation, "Translation and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German-Turkish Connectivity."
In her pathbreaking and erudite dissertation “Translation and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German Turkish Connectivity,” Kristin Ann Dickinson (UC-Berkeley) retraces two centuries of omnidirectional translation practices to suggest that the literatures in question have never been simply national. In chapters that take us from J. W. von Goethe to Orhan Pamuk, from the Weltliteratur of early “German” romanticism to the Turkey in All Its Colors program of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, the dissertation demonstrates in meticulous detail that German and Turkish understandings of modernity have proceeded in and through each other, overturning in the process any notion that either was autonomously produced. Dickinson’s argument is drawn from a multilingual archive that few of her contemporaries can access, let alone command with her rigor and insight. Our committee agrees enthusiastically with the judgment of one of her advisors: this dissertation “has the potential to reconfigure the geopolitics of literary studies.”
2017 Charles Bernheimer Prize Committee:
Andrew Parker (Commitee Chair 2016-2017 - Rutgers University),.
Meera Viswanathan (Brown University),
Anahid Nersessian (University of California, Los Angeles)
This year's Bernheimer Prize Award for Best Dissertation by a Graduate Student in Comparative Literature goes to Kristin Ann Dickinson of the University of California, Berkeley, for her dissertation, "Translation and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German-Turkish Connectivity."
In her pathbreaking and erudite dissertation “Translation and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German Turkish Connectivity,” Kristin Ann Dickinson (UC-Berkeley) retraces two centuries of omnidirectional translation practices to suggest that the literatures in question have never been simply national. In chapters that take us from J. W. von Goethe to Orhan Pamuk, from the Weltliteratur of early “German” romanticism to the Turkey in All Its Colors program of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, the dissertation demonstrates in meticulous detail that German and Turkish understandings of modernity have proceeded in and through each other, overturning in the process any notion that either was autonomously produced. Dickinson’s argument is drawn from a multilingual archive that few of her contemporaries can access, let alone command with her rigor and insight. Our committee agrees enthusiastically with the judgment of one of her advisors: this dissertation “has the potential to reconfigure the geopolitics of literary studies.”
2017 Charles Bernheimer Prize Committee:
Andrew Parker (Commitee Chair 2016-2017 - Rutgers University),.
Meera Viswanathan (Brown University),
Anahid Nersessian (University of California, Los Angeles)