2008 Margaret Church MFS Memorial Prize

The Editors are pleased to announce the winner of the 2008 Margaret Church Memorial Prize for the best essay to appear in MFS. The Church Prize was established in 1984 in memory of Dr. Church, professor of English and comparative literature at Purdue University and a longtime editor of this journal.

The winner for 2008 is Sara Crangle, author of "The Time Being: On Woolf and Boredom," which appeared in volume 54, issue 2 (pages 209-32).

Special thanks to Rob Nixon (University of Wisconsin) for choosing this year's winner. In making his selection, Prof. Nixon writes,

This is an ambitious and fluent essay, expansive without being diffuse. Crangle shows a profound command of the vast literature on boredom yet manages to blend it lightly into her distinctive line of thinking. She does a fine job of moving among aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological discourses of boredom without compromising her voice or the momentum of her argument. In opening up Woolf scholarship to a broader literature of boredom, Crangle engages convincingly with the creative paradoxes of boredom as an enabling and disabling condition. In the process, the essay adds to our understanding of Woolf's complex embodiment of privilege and affliction and, beyond that, argues convincingly for the unpredictable creative consequences of what might be dismissed as the most monotonous and predictable of states.

Prof. Crangle, who teaches at University of Sussex, received $300 and a certificate, a copy of which appears here.