Award:
Martin Stevens Award
Award Year:
2023
Winner: Laguna, Ana. “In the Name of Love: Cervantes’ Play on Captivity in La gran sultana.” In Drawing the Curtain: Cervantes's Theatrical Revelations, edited by Esther Fernández and Adrienne Martín, pp. 150–176. University of Toronto Press, 2022.
The Stevens/Palmer committee awards this year’s Stevens Award for the best new essay in early drama studies to Ana Laguna, Professor of Early Modern Spanish Literature at the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers–Camden, for her chapter, “In the Name of Love: Cervantes’ Play on Captivity in La gran sultana,” in the collection Drawing the Curtain: Cervantes's Theatrical Revelations, edited by Esther Fernández and Adrienne Martín and published by The University of Toronto Press in 2022. This brilliant study examines the idea of captivity through the representation of the harem in Cervantes’ La gran sultana (circa 1608), persuasively arguing that this play critiques the patriarchal structures that “pervaded the Eastern and Western Mediterranean cultures,” and particularly the institution, or “prison,” of marriage.
Committee: Mark Chambers, Christopher Swift, and Harry Cushman (chair). Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2023, at the 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.