New York, NY – 3 December 2025 – The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its fifty-sixth annual James Russell Lowell Prize to Adela Pinch, professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for her book The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living, published by Fordham University Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding book—aliterary or linguistic study, a critical edition of an important work, or a critical biography—written by a member of the association.
The James Russell Lowell Prize is one of twenty-three publication awards that will be presented on 9 January 2026 during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Toronto. A complete list of current and previous winners can be found on the MLA website. First presented in 1969, the James Russell Lowell Prize is awarded under the auspices of the MLA’s Committee on Honors and Awards. The selection committee members were Faith E. Beasley (Dartmouth Coll.); Florence S. Boos (Univ. of Iowa); Anthony J. Cascardi (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Anne E. Duggan (Wayne State Univ.); Yoon Sun Lee (Wellesley Coll.); Julie Park (Penn State Univ., University Park); and Kevin Quashie (Brown Univ.), chair. The committee’s citation for the winning book reads:
In The Location of Experience, Adela Pinch writes with elegant and persuasive clarity, offering a refreshing take on the discourse of realism and the genre of the novel. Pinch mobilizes the “dynamic force of experience” as the basis for a meditation on being and becoming, one that dramatizes the moral and psychological conceits at stake in the ordinary happenings in narrative worlds and the way that these events—and their implications—amplify “ontological and temporal” distinctions that entangle character, narrator, and reader. The book’s insights radiate beyond the field particularity of Victorian fiction or nineteenth-century women writers, and therein is its achievement: The Location of Experience enacts a potent theory of the novel that reads beautifully and engagingly, akin to being caught in the experiential complexity of reading a good book.
James Russell Lowell (1819–91) was a scholar and poet. His first important literary activity came as editor of and frequent contributor to the National Anti-slavery Standard. In 1848 Lowell published several volumes of poetry, criticism, humor, and political satire, including The Vision of Sir Launfal and the first Biglow Papers, which firmly established him in the galaxy of American writers of his day. In 1855 he succeeded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as Smith Professor of French and Spanish at Harvard. Lowell was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1857–61) and was later minister to Spain and Britain. James Russell Lowell served as second president of the MLA from 1887 until his death in 1891.
The Modern Language Association of America and its over 20,000 members in 100 countries work to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literature. Founded in 1883, the MLA provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy. The MLA sustains one of the finest publication programs in the humanities, producing a variety of publications for language and literature professionals and for the general public. The association publishes the MLA International Bibliography, the only comprehensive bibliography in language and literature, available online. The MLA Annual Convention features nearly 700 scholarly and professional development sessions. More information on MLA programs is available at www.mla.org.
