Loading ...Arab American English professor wins national book prize
Angela Naimou, associate professor of English at Clemson University, has won the 2016 ASAP Book Prize from the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present. Naimou’s book, “Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood,” was published in 2015 by Fordham University Press.
Each year, the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present honors the best book submitted from publications on the contemporary arts in the preceding year. The association’s prize committee called Naimou’s book “an unnerving, at times wrenching, and always original first book,” observing that it “sets a high bar politically, ethically and stylistically for contemporary literary studies.”
The Fordham press describes Naimou’s book as “an examination of contemporary literary responses to the law’s construction of personhood in the Americas.”
Naimou said, “In writing this book, I wanted to understand how legal and racial identities have come to underlie some of our most entrenched national and global problems, from the relationship between workers and corporations to the conflicts over the legal status of stateless persons, refugees and citizens. What I found is that writers and artists have generated some of the most thoughtful and illuminating ways to grapple with these problems. This book is my attempt at drawing out some of the complexity, beauty and enormous significance of literature and the humanities to our time. It’s a wonderful honor for ‘Salvage Work’ to be recognized as a significant contribution to scholarship on the contemporary arts.”
The 2016 ASAP Book Prize committee members were Marijeta Bozovic (assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures, Yale University) and Matthew Jesse Jackson (associate professor of art history, University of Chicago), as well as Jonathan Eburne (past president of ASAP and associate professor of comparative literature and English, Penn State University).
“We in Clemson English are very proud of professor’s Naimou’s accomplishment in ‘Salvage Work’ and of the award that reflects her achievement in the book,” said Lee Morrissey, professor and chair of the Clemson English department. “The book raises important ethical and political issues surrounding the treatment and experience of immigrants over time. Receiving an award from the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present also reflects well on Clemson’s College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, focusing as the college does on the study of the arts.”
Naimou joined the Clemson English faculty in 2008. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she was a Mellon Graduate Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities and winner of the Dean’s Prize for Distinguished Teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences. Before joining Clemson, Naimou was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Tulane University. She is an associate editor of the journal College Literature and on the editorial board for the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.