Inger Brodey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received the 2009 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Studies Book Award.
Brodey is associate professor of English and comparative literature and Asian studies in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Brodey won the award for her 2008 book, “Ruined by Design: Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility.” The book on landscape gardening and the history of the novel features the work of Laurence Sterne, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Jane Austen.
“Inger Brodey has written a book of remarkable vitality about the fascination with ruins across eighteenth-century Europe,” said Wu Hung, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago in reviewing the book. “Instead of focusing on a single field like poetry, painting or garden design in isolation, she uncovers their shared penchant for fragmentation which defines the culture of sensibility.”
Brodey has won national awards for her scholarship, including a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities. She was recently awarded an Earhart Foundation Research Grant to complete a book-length comparison of cowboys and samurai in film. She also is working on a study of representations of Jane Austen in Asia.
At Carolina, Brodey directs undergraduate studies in comparative literature. She won a 2006 UNC Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
