English Professor Wins Modern Language Association Book Award

Seeta Chaganti, a professor of English, recently received a prize from the Modern Language Association of America (MLS) for her book exploring the complex relationship between medieval dance and medieval poetry. Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.

In its announcement of the award, the MLS stated: “Through her rich and historically grounded readings of medieval and modern works, Chaganti unearths an alternative phenomenology that transcends the confines of specific media and helps us understand varieties of sensory response beyond (and before) modernism’s stark regimentation of the senses.”

Chaganti joined the UC Davis Department of English, housed in the College of Letters and Science, in 2001. She specializes in Old and Middle English poetry and its intersections with material culture. Strange Footing was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.