The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

Huge congratulations to Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh, who has been awarded this year's William Riley Parker Prize for the best article published in  PMLA , the leading journal for literary studies!  His article “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject” appeared in the May 2019 issue of  PMLA .  Dr. Javadizadeh will  be presented with his award on 11 January 2020, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in Seattle. The members of the selection committee were Elizabeth Bearden (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison); Christopher D. Castiglia (Penn State Univ., University Park), chair; Beth Piatote (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Melissa E. Sanchez (Univ. of Pennsylvania); and John H. Smith (Univ. of California, Irvine). In their citation the committee wrote: "' The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads' rose gracefully from a comparison of a line appearing in poems written by Claudia Rankin...

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh was recently published in PMLA, the official publication of the Modern Language Association. His article, “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject,” arose for Dr. Javadizadeh when he was reading Rankine's Citizen. "I noticed," said Javadizadeh, "that, tucked into the middle of her book, and in a moment that seemed to me like a reference to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery, Rankine used a phrase—'the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads'—that she was clearly (to me at least!) lifting and adapting from a poem by Robert Lowell. But I had no idea what the two moments had to do with each other—and no idea, therefore, why Rankine was turning to Lowell’s language to evoke the history of slavery." Javadizadeh started digging, and what he found surprised him. "It was when I went back to Lowell’s archive at Harvard and looked at drafts of ...