Murray State University’s Rebecca Rosen Honored by the Modern Language Association

Rebecca M. Rosen, assistant professor of English at Murray State University in Kentucky, has been awarded the 2022 Richard Beale Davis Prize. This award is presented by the Modern Language Association Early American Literature Forum.

Dr. Rosen is being honored for her article “The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven’: Speaking and Discovering Infanticide in the Early American Northeast.”

The prize committee notes that Rosen “draws attention to the dead body as authoritative material evidence after the Salem witch trials, earning cruentation (a postmortem test based on the belief that a murdered body would bleed in the presence of its murderer) a place in Puritan judicial inquiry tantamount to the spectral evidence in the Witch Trials.

Dr. Rosen is a graduate of Barnard College in New York City. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford in England and a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in New Jersey.