UCSB-TRAINED PROFESSOR WINS PRESTIGIOUS BOOK PRIZE

University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Philip Watts has become the fourth author with UCSB ties in the past eight years to have been honored with the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Literary Studies. The award is given annually by The Modern Language Association of America.

Watts, who earned a B.A. in French from UCSB before taking his doctorate at Columbia, was recognized at the MLA annual convention, Dec. 27-30, in Washington, D.C., for his book, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (1999 Stanford University Press).

Recognition of Watts' scholarship and writing continues something of a UCSB tradition. Professor Jody Enders of UCSB's Department of French and Italian won the same award in 1993, the first year it was presented. In 1996, the award went to Professor Cynthia Brown, also of that department. And in 1999, the winner was George Hoffmann, an assistant professor at Boston University who earned a master's degree in French at UCSB.