[2] The Parker Prize is awarded each year for an “outstanding article” published in PMLA—the association's primary journal, and widely considered the most prestigious in the study of modern languages and literatures.
[3][4] It was first awarded in 1964 to David J. DeLaura, then a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, for his article, “Arnold and Carlyle,” which had been published in the March 1964 issue of PMLA.
[1] Parker, a professor at Indiana University, was a Milton biographer whose scholarship also considered the formation of literary studies in the United States.
[9][10] More recently, Gordon Fraser was awarded the prize for "Troubling the Cold War Logic of Annihilation," an article published in the May 2015 issue of PMLA.
2021 Robin Bernstein, Harvard University, for “‘You Do It!’: Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children’s Literature” (PMLA, October 2020) William Stroebel, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for “Longhand Lines of Flight: Cataloging Displacement in a Karamanli Refugee’s Commonplace Book” (PMLA, March 2021) Honorable mention: Theodore Martin, University of California, Irvine, for “War-on-Crime Fiction” (PMLA, March 2021) 2020 Sarah Wasserman, University of Delaware, Newark, for “Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and the Persistence of Urban Forms” (PMLA, May 2020) Honorable mention: James Mulholland, North Carolina State University, for “Translocal Anglo-India and the Multilingual Reading Public” (PMLA, March 2020) 2019 Kamran Javadizadeh, Villanova University, for "The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject" (PMLA, May 2019) Honorable mention: Edgar Garcia, University of Chicago, for “Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich” (PMLA, March 2019) Honorable mention: Laura E. Helton, University of Delaware, Newark, for “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading” (PMLA, January 2019) 2018 Katherine Fusco, University of Nevada, Reno, for “Sexing Farina: Our Gang’s Episodes of Racial Childhood” (PMLA, May 2018) Honorable mention: Eric Calderwood, University of Illinois, Urbana, for “Franco’s Hajj: Moroccan Pilgrims, Spanish Fascism, and the Unexpected Journeys of Modern Arabic Literature” (PMLA, October 2017) Honorable mention: Ricardo Matthews, California State University, Fullerton, and University of California, Irvine, for “Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory” (PMLA, March 2018) 2017 Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University, for “Primitive Passions, Blinding Visions: Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Mystique’ and a Tradition of Mystical Ekphrasis” (PMLA, January 2017) Honorable mention: Irene Siegel, Brooklyn, New York, for “A Judeo-Arab-Muslim Continuum: Edmond Amran El Maleh’s Poetics of Fragments” (PMLA, January 2017) 2016 Yasser Elhariry, Dartmouth College, for “Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sufi Poets, and the New Francophone Lyric” (PMLA, March 2016) 2015 Gordon Fraser, University of Connecticut, Storrs, for “Troubling the Cold War Logic of Annihilation: Apocalyptic Temporalities in Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” (PMLA, May 2015) 2014 Christopher Cannon, New York University, for “From Literacy to Literature: Elementary Learning and the Middle English Poet” (PMLA, May 2014) Honorable mention: John Levi Barnard, College of Wooster, for “Ancient History, American Time: Chesnutt’s Outsider Classicism and the Present Past” (PMLA, January 2014) 2013 Margaret Ronda, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for “‘Work and Wait Unwearying’: Dunbar's Georgics” (PMLA, October 2012) 2012 Tobias Menely, Miami University, Oxford, for “‘The Present Obfuscation’: Cowper's Task and the Time of Climate Change” (PMLA, May 2012) 2011 Toral Jatin Gajarawala, New York University, for “Some Time between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature” (PMLA, May 2011) Paul Benzon, Temple University, for “Lost in Transcription: Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad Book, and the Standardization of Error” (PMLA, January 2010) 2009 Enrique García Santo-Tomás, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for “Fortunes of the Occhiali Politici in Early Modern Spain: Optics, Vision, Points of View” (PMLA, January 2009) 2008 Nergis Ertürk, Pennsylvania State University, for "Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar's Hasret, Benjamin's Melancholy" (PMLA, January 2008) 2007 Pauline Yu, American Council of Learned Societies, for "'Your Alabaster in This Porcelain': Judith Gautier's Le livre de jade" (March 2007) Honorable mention: Joseph R. Slaughter, Columbia University, for "Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law" (October 2006) 2006 Lorraine Piroux, Rutgers University, for "The Encyclopedist and the Peruvian Princess: The Poetics of Illegibility in French Enlightenment Book Culture" (January 2006) 2005 Bill Brown, University of Chicago, for "The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)" (May 2005) Honorable mention: Feisal G. Mohamed, Texas Tech University, for "Confronting Religious Violence: Milton's Samson Agonistes" (March 2005) 2004 Rolf J. Goebel, University of Alabama, Huntsville, for "Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problems of Historical Authenticity" (October 2003) 2003 Anne Mallory, University of Georgia, for "Burke, Boredom, and the Theater of Counterrevolution" (March 2003) Honorable mention: Paul Giles, University of Oxford, for "Transnationalism and Classic American Literature" (January 2003) 2002 Geoffrey Sanborn, Bard College, for "Keeping Her Distance: Cisneros, Dickinson, and the Politics of Private Enjoyment" (October 2001) 2001 Ian Baucom, Duke University, for "Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies" (January 2001) Rita Felski, University of Virginia, for "Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class" (January 2000) 1999 Phillip Novak, Le Moyne College, for "'Circles and Circles of Sorrow': In the Wake of Morrison's Sula" (March 1999) 1998 Henry Staten, University of Washington, for "Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case of Hunger of Memory" (January 1998) 1997 Jahan Ramazani, University of Virginia, for "The Wound of History: Walcott's Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction" (May 1997) 1996 Lawrence Lipking, Northwestern University, for "The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism" (March 1996) Honorable mention: Ann Louise Kibbie, Bowdoin College, for "Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana" (October 1995) 1995 David Wayne Thomas, University of California, Davis, for "Gödel's Theorem and Postmodern Theory" (March 1995) 1994 Claire Cavanagh, University of Wisconsin, Madison, for "Rereading the Poet's Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin, and Stalin" (January 1994) 1993 Alan Nadel, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for "God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War 'Epic'" (May 1993) 1992 Edward Hirsch, University of Houston, for "The Imaginary Irish Peasant" (October 1991) 1991 Beth S. Newman, Southern Methodist University, for "'The Situation of the Looker-On': Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights" (October 1990), and David K. Herzberger, University of Connecticut, for "Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain" (January 1991) William L. Andrews, University of Kansas, for "The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative" (January 1990) 1989 Margaret Waller, Pomona College, for "Cherchez la Femme: Male Malady and Narrative Politics in the French Romantic Novel" (March 1989) 1988 Thomas C. Caramagno, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, for "Manic-Depressive Psychosis and Critical Approaches to Virginia Woolf's Life and Work" (January 1988) 1987 Donald W. Foster, Vassar College, for "Master W. H., R.I.P."