Targoff honored by Modern Language Association of America

Ramie Targoff, director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities and professor of English at Brandeis University, will receive honorable mention for the Modern Language Association of America’s 46^th annual James Russell Lowell Prize for her book “Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England.”
 
The prize is awarded annually to a member of the association who has produced an outstanding work such as a literary or linguistic study, critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography.
 
Targoff’s book, published by University of Chicago Press, studies the shift in human love’s portrayal in Renaissance-era prose and its consequences for English poetry.
 
Targoff notes that English poetry roots human love in mortality, which is a strict departure from Renaissance writers such as Dante and Petrarch, who said love extended beyond death and into heaven.