Paul Saint-Amour, professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, has won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize for 2016 for his most recent book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form  (Oxford University Press, 2015). The prize is awarded annually to a book published in the previous year that has made a significant contribution to modernist studies.

Saint-Amour works on Victorian and modernist literature and has special interests in the novel, law, trauma and visual culture studies.

In Tense Future, Saint-Amour examines the role of anticipation in trauma, as opposed to the nearly exclusive focus in trauma studies on post-traumatic syndromes. He argues that 20th-century war technologies and practices, such as the aerial bombing of cities, introduced civilians to a coercive and traumatizing expectation or “pre-traumatic stress.”

Additional information about the award is at https://msa.press.jhu.edu/prize/.