Maria Antonia Garcés, a professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, has been awarded the Modern Language Association's 34th James Russell Lowell Prize for her book Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002). The MLA's prestigious annual prize is awarded for an outstanding book, literary or linguistic study, critical edition of an important work or a critical biography written by a member of the association.

The MLA committee's citation for the winning book reads: "In the wake of 9/11 and our military enterprise in Iraq, Americans are asking more-informed questions about the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims across the globe. Cervantes in Algiers – a magisterial exploration of the sociopolitical world of 16th-century North Africa – maps the surprisingly porous frontiers between Muslim and Christian worlds in the early modern period. This pioneering book minutely examines Cervantes' five-year captivity in Algiers and gauges the impact of this traumatic experience on his fiction. As Cervantes himself reminds us in the prologue to Part 1 of Don Quixote , his great novel was 'hatched in a prison.' Cervantes in Algiers rethinks the connections between trauma and creativity even as it enlightens the long and vexed history of relations between Islam and the West."

Born in Colombia, Garcés was director of the Instituto Departamental de Bellas Artes in Cali, Colombia, between 1977 and 1982, and the founder of the Orquesta Sinfonica del Valle del Cauca in 1977. After moving to the United States, she obtained an M.A. in English from Georgetown University (1987) and earned a Ph.D. in Spanish from Johns Hopkins University in 1994, the same year she joined the Cornell faculty. Among her honors and awards are a Fulbright Research Fellowship (2004) and a junior fellowship from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell (1997-98).

As a scholar in the field of transatlantic studies, her research has focused on early modern Hispanic literatures on both sides of the Atlantic, from Cervantes to Hispanic-American literatures and historiography and their relation with the Spanish Peninsula. She is the author of numerous articles on Cervantes, as well as others on Montaigne, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Guaman Poma de Ayala. An expanded and revised version of Cervantes in Algiers will be published by Editorial Gredos, Spain, in 2005. Forthcoming works include a critical Spanish edition and a concomitant English translation of Topografia e historia general de Argel , edited by Diego de Haedo.

The James Russell Lowell Prize will be presented during the MLA annual convention in San Diego, Dec. 28. The Lowell prize selection committee members were Margaret Cohen, New York University; Emory Elliott, University of California-Riverside, chair; Bonnie Kime Scott, San Diego State University; Diana Wilson, University of Denver; and Michael Wood, Princeton University.

The MLA, established in 1883 and one of the largest and oldest American learned societies in the humanities, promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.