Uri McMillan,’09 GRD, awarded prestigious MLA Scarborough Prize

Uri McMillan

The Modern Language Association of America today announced it is awarding its fifteenth annual William Sanders Scarborough Prize to Uri McMillan, of the University of California, Los Angeles, for his book Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, published by New York University Press.  

The William Sanders Scarborough Prize is one of seventeen awards that will be presented on 7 January 2017, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Philadelphia. The members of the selection committee were Aliyyah Inaya Abdur-Rahman (Brandeis Univ.); David Ikard (Univ. of Miami), chair; and Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor). The committee’s citation for the winning book reads, in part:

With brilliant insights and deeply inspired textual analysis at every turn of the page, Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance is simply dazzling. A tour de force, this study traces two centuries of black women’s performance practice, arguing that black women have masterfully converted experiences of objectification and objecthood into radical art praxis from the nineteenth century through the contemporary period.

McMillan received his Ph.D from Yale University in 2009, when his dissertation was awarded the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for best written work by a graduate student on African or African-American Art.

Read the entire MLA news release here:  http://afamstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/MLA_SRB_Press_Rele…

Tuesday, December 6, 2016