Tom Heffernan, the Kenneth Curry Professor in the Humanities and director of the UT Humanities Center, has won the Modern Language Association Prize for a Scholarly Edition.
The award is for his edition of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, published by Oxford University Press. He will receive the prize, announced earlier this month, at the association’s annual convention in Chicago.
The award committee praised Heffernan’s work as “not only a model of scholarly method but also a readable, humane work of critical and historical illumination … His lucid English translation includes a comprehensive introduction and a line-by-line (sometimes word-for-word) commentary that is a pleasure to read, deftly deploying massive learning in an attractively conversational style. The commentary seems effortless—yet any working critic or editor will recognize the extraordinary effort that went into it.”
Honorable mentions went to faculty members from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Oxford.