Two Women Scholars Receive the 2024 First Book Award From the Modernist Studies Association

The Modernist Studies Association has recently awarded the 2024 First Book Prize to two recipients: Pardis Dabashi, assistant professor of literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and Kirsty Sinclar Dootson, lecturer of film and media at University College London.

Dr. Dabashi was honored for her monograph, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modernist Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2023). The book examines plot, ambivalence, and normativity in classical Hollywood cinema and the modernist novel.

A Bryn Mawr College faculty member since 2022, Dr. Dabashi holds faculty affiliations with the film studies program and the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African studies program. Previously, she was an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno for three years. She has authored several scholarly publications and co-edited The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Dr. Dabashi received her bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in New York City and her Ph.D. in English from Boston University.

Dr. Dootson was recognized for her book, The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality, and British Modernity (Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre, 2023), which discusses how chromatic media influenced British culture and the British empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Prior to her current role at University College London, Dr. Dootson was a lecturer in film studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She previously held research positions with Cambridge University, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the department of painting and sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Dr. Dootson received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in the history of art from the University of Cambridge. She holds a master’s degree in film and television studies from the University of Warwick in England and a Ph.D. in the history of art and film studies from Yale University.