Pamela Cheek Honored for Her Book on Women Authors of the Eighteenth Century

Pamela L. Cheek, associate provost of student success and professor of French and comparative literary studies at the University of New Mexico, has been awarded the 2022 Lauren Shannon Prize from the Navonic Institute for European Studies, which is housed at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

The Laura Shannon Prize, one of the preeminent prizes for European studies, is awarded each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. This year’s cycle of the award considered books in the humanities published in 2019 or 2020.

Professor Cheek was honored for her book Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). The explores the rise of women’s writing in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810.

The prize committee stated that “Cheek moves effortlessly from compelling close readings of important individual female-authored works to adopting a more collective, comparative overview of women’s writing. She analyzes the interplay between aesthetic and commercial concerns that helped facilitate the burgeoning international circulation of female-authored texts in the European literary marketplace and women’s self-positioning within it.”

Professor Cheek is a manga cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in literature. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University.