MLA Awards First Book Prize to Dana Luciano - Georgetown College

The Modern Language Association (MLA) of America has awarded the 2008 Prize for a First Book to Georgetown English professor Dana Luciano, for “Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America” (New York University Press 2007).

In “Arranging Grief,” Luciano, an associate professor of English, presents a new perspective on the history of sexuality by thinking through the connections between the body, time and attachment. She argues that the pronounced 19th-century attention to grief and mourning should be read as a response to cultural anxieties over various aspects of modernization, including the modernization of time itself.