Harriet Murav, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Comparative and World Literature, has received an honorable mention from the MLA (Modern Language Association) Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies for her book David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity, published by Indiana University Press. The prize is awarded each even-numbered year and is given alternately to an outstanding translation of a Yiddish literary work and to an outstanding scholarly work in English in the field of Yiddish.

The committee’s citation for Professor Murav’s book reads: Harriet Murav’s David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity is a magisterial study of one of the most important modernist writers of the twentieth century. Murav places Bergelson in the context of such major theorists as Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, thereby illuminating some of the most pressing political, philosophical, and cultural concerns of his day and ours. A model of interdisciplinary study, Murav’s book offers new interpretations of Bergelson’s fiction and of the questions about temporality and memory that animate his writing.

Murav also is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at Illinois and earlier this year was named a Center for Advanced Study Professor, the University's highest honor.

The Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies is one of 18 awards that will be presented on Jan. 9 during the association’s annual convention, to be held online.