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Kirschenbaum Wins MLA First Book Prize

June 29, 2010 English

The Modern Language Association has awarded its sixteenth annual Prize for a First Book to Matt Kirschenbaum for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008).

Mechanisms (MIT 2008)This major award caps off an impressive two years for Kirschenbaum, who has drawn national and international attention to the inscription and transmission of digital literatures. Mechanisms has already won numerous awards from the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. Kirschenbaum's work has received media coverage from Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The MLA Prize for a First Book is awarded annually to the book-length literary or linguistic study, critical edition, or critical biography that makes the most outsanding contribution to the field. The selection committee's citation for Mechanisms reads: "Mechanisms is a genuinely original, field-defining contribution to media studies, promising to have a major impact on the fields of literary studies, book history, and digital culture. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum brilliantly puts new media studies into dialogue with book history and textual studies, teaching readers anew how to think about materiality, form, durability, and emphemerality in a digital age."

The award will be presented later this month at the MLA convention in Philadelphia.

Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor English, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technologies in the Humanities (MITH), and Director of Digital Culture and Creativity, a new living-learning program in the Honors Colleg at the University of Maryland.

More on the award can be found in the MLA press release available here.