Paul Saint-Amour Awarded 2016 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize

Paul Saint-Amour, a professor of English at Penn Arts and Sciences, has won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for 2016 for his most recent book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. The prize is awarded annually to a book published in the previous year that has made a significant contribution to modernist studies.

Saint-Amour works on Victorian and modernist literature and has special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies.

In Tense Future, Saint-Amour examines the role of anticipation in trauma, as opposed to the nearly exclusive focus in trauma studies on post-traumatic syndromes. He argues that 20th-century war technologies and practices, such as the aerial bombing of cities, introduced civilians to a coercive and traumatizing expectation, or “pre-traumatic stress.”

Additional information about the award is here.

See Saint-Amour discuss “pre-traumatic stress” in a 60-Second Lecture here.