Branka Arsić, Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature, has received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society’s 2024 Distinguished Achievement Award for her scholarship that exemplifies “Emersonian strains of interest in the conduct of language and disciplinary variety.”
Not only has Branka Arsić distinguished herself in Emerson scholarship, she has demonstrated a capacious curiosity about the contours of nineteenth-century letters. With innovative and incisive investigations into the works of Thoreau, Melville, and Dickinson, she has demonstrated time and again the interconnectedness of the era’s thinkers while also illuminating what is distinctive about each of the representatives who attract her attention. She also admirably extends beyond the nineteenth-century on both sides: reaching back to Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet, and Jonathan Edwards on the one side and to Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell on the other. Throughout her labors as a critic and theorist, she provides a robust and engaging model of scholarship conducted at the interface of literature and philosophy.
Congratulations, Professor Arsić!