The Modern Language Association of America recently announced its ninth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies. An honourable mention was given to Rhiannon Noel Welch, of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for her book Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, 1860–1920, published by Liverpool University Press.

Rhiannon Welch said, “It is an incredible honour to be mentioned for the Scaglione Prize alongside luminaries in the field like Serenella Iovino and William Kennedy. Though Vital Subjects is a book about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century in Italy, my hope is that it might shed light on Italy’s ongoing and quite urgent negotiations of race, belonging, and citizenship in the twenty-first.”

Vital Subjects was the first book to appear in LUP’s Transnational Italian Cultures series which aims to publish works in the expanding field of postcolonial, global and transnational Italian studies, setting a new agenda for academic research on what constitutes Italian culture today. The second book in the series, Accidental Orientalists by Barbara Spackman, was published in July 2017.

LUP hopes to continue to build on this already strong list, publishing texts that are informed by current postcolonial/transnational methodology. Transnational Italian Cultures is accepting book proposals for projects focusing primarily on the contemporary context, with an emphasis on the analysis of textual production, and with a cultural studies perspective. To discuss a book proposal please get in touch with the Commissioning Editor, Chloe Johnson.