Joseph Albernaz Awarded MLA Prize for a First Book

The Department of English and Comparative Literature warmly congratulates Prof. Joseph Albernaz, who has been awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book for his monograph Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community (Stanford UP, 2024).

The Prize Committee's citation reads:

A far-reaching meditation on the poetics and politics of communal life, Joseph Albernaz’s Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community shows how Romantic writers navigated the devastation of the commons (both as material reality and conceptual grounds) and the rise of a capitalist regime of abstraction, commensurability, and atomized individualism by seeking out entirely different ways to think about how human beings should live with one another. Drawing on a wide-ranging archive, Albernaz shows how literary forms made possible the imagination of a “groundless community,” in which one’s relation to others is not rooted in a shared group identity but rather situated in everyday social and ecological relations characterized by openness and abundance. Through sensitive, insightful readings, Common Measures points readers to the past, present, and future, to both the legacies and the possibilities of groundlessness.  

The full press release is available via the MLA website, here