2022 - "The Literary ‘Me Too’ of the 18th Century: Women’s Writing and the Capital of Virtue"

Pamela L. Cheek, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of New Mexico, was awarded the 2022 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies for her book Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Cheek teaches courses ranging from beginning French to graduate literary theory, from a seminar on Paris as a cultural capital to a class on race and gender in the circum-atlantic Gothic novel. She received her A.B. in Literature from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1987 and completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1994 as a Mellon Fellow. Her research focuses on the ways that early modern Western European representations of sexuality and gender have contributed to cultural globalization.

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