Laura Shannon Prize Winner
Laura Shannon Prize Winner
Women at Work in Twenty-First Century European Cinema
by Barbara Mennel
2022 Honorable Mention in Humanities
Jury Statement
Ranging across both arthouse and popular films from nearly two dozen European countries, Barbara Mennel’s Women at Work illuminates the diverse representations of women’s labor in twenty-first century European cinema. This groundbreaking book embeds culture-specific approaches to working women within the broader contexts of global financial crises, neoliberal capitalism, precarity, migration and the ethics and economics of biotechnology. Admirably attentive to the diversity of European feminisms and cinematic idioms, Mennel explores both the transcending of female stereotypes and their durability. Many films she examines show how female economic empowerment often rests on the exploited domestic and reproductive labor of migrant women. A captivating overview of current European cinema, Women at Work offers timely and discerning insight into the evolving meanings of feminism in contemporary Europe on both sides of the former Iron Curtain.
Final Jury
Edyta Bojanowska
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Chair of the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center
Yale University
Stephen M. Fallon
The Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Professor of the Humanities
University of Notre Dame
Robin Jensen
The Patrick O’Brien Professor of Theology
University of Notre Dame
Siobhán McIlvanney
Professor of French and Francophone Women’s Writing
King’s College London
Lenart Škof
Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Head of the Institute for Philosophical Studies
Science and Research Center Koper (ZRS Koper), Slovenia