Some recent awards for Cornell University Press books

Valerie Kivelson’s Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia has won the Heldt Prize given by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the best book by a woman in Slavic studies. Cartographies of Tsardom also won the 2007 Bainton History and Theology Prize given by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Francine Hirsch’s Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2007 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize. Empire of Nations is also the cowinner of the 2006 Council for European Studies First Book Award and the winner of the 2006 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize given by the AAASS.

Dalia Tsuk Mitchell’s Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2007 Littleton-Griswold Prize.

The Order of Genocide by Scott Straus has received an honorable mention for the African Studies Association’s 2007 Melville J. Herskovits Award. The Order of Genocide is also the winner of the Award for Excellence in Government and Political Science (Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers).

Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 by Susan Boynton is the winner of the Lewis Lockwood Award given by the American Musicological Society.

Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion by Celia Applegate is the winner of the DAAD Book Prize given by the German Studies Association.

Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South by Catherine Kerrison is the winner of the 2007 History of Education Society Outstanding Book Award.

Congratulations one and all!

Muhsin Mahdi Dies; Edited and Translated Two Books with Cornell

As reported in the September/October issue of Philosophy Now, Muhsin Mahdi, the world’s foremost expert on medieval Arabic and Islamic political philosophy, died in August at the age of 81. Born in Iraq, he spent his academic career at the University of Baghdad (1947–1957), the University of Chicago (1957–1969), and Harvard University (1969–1996), where he held the James Richard Jewett Professorship in Arabic. Among his many books were two works he published with Cornell University Press—Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, which he coedited with Ralph Lerner, and an acclaimed translation of Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, originally published in 1969 and reissued in 2002 with a new foreword by Charles E. Butterworth and Thomas L. Pangle. Both books reflect the remarkable archival and philological work for which Mahdi was universally admired.

Cornell Author Named Dean of William Mitchell Law School

Eric Janus, author of the 2006 Cornell Press book Failure to Protect: America’s Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventative State, was recently named president and dean of William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. Janus has been a member of the William Mitchell faculty since 1984 and vice dean since 2004. He got his law degree from Harvard University in 1973. Prior to joining the William Mitchell faculty, he served as a staff lawyer and managing attorney with the Minneapolis Legal Aid Society, where his work included drafting and lobbying for the Minnesota Vulnerable Adult Protection Act.

Laura Palmer in St. Petersburg

With the DVD release of Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition, fans of the show can relive every twist and turn of the landmark television series that asked (and, unfortunately, answered) the most important question of 1990–1991: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” What many American fans of the cult show probably don’t realize is how popular the show was in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Amidst the extreme homegrown Russian entertainment he surveys in his new book, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, an unflinching tour of the dark underbelly of post-Soviet culture, Eliot Borenstein also highlights the impact of American popular culture (not to mention Mexican telenovelas) on Russia’s media industry. “For the Russian audience,” Borenstein writes, “Twin Peaks, despite its iconoclasm, is a case study in the strengths and pitfalls of the American serialized drama.” He also takes note of the the series’ appearance as an artifact in Russian popular culture itself: “In Maks Frai’s Chronicles of Echo fantasy series, when Frai returns to the otherdimensional land of Ekho from an extended sojourn in our world, he brings back his video library and his ex-girlfriend’s VCR to introduce film and television to a land that has never seen it. His boss immediately takes several days off from work so he can watch Twin Peaks nonstop.”

Josiah Bartlett Lambert on the writers’ strike

MSNBC called on Josiah Bartlett Lambert, author of If the Workers Took a Notion, for his expertise:

Writers a Rarity—A Union with Power