2025

The University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the previous calendar year. 

Honorable Mention: Xiaolu Ma, Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880–1930) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2024) 

Xiaolu Ma’s Transpatial Modernity is a pioneering and elegantly argued study that reshapes our understanding of East Asian modernity by tracing the complex, multilayered encounters between Chinese intellectuals and Russian literary culture as mediated through Japan between 1880 and 1930. Challenging nation-centered models of cultural transmission, the book introduces the concept of “transpatial modernity” to capture the multidirectional, multilingual, and cross-imperial networks that shaped modern literary culture and radical political thought in the region. Through rich archival research and nuanced readings of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, Ma reconstructs a dynamic cultural history in which ideas, texts, and people traversed borders and linguistic divides, generating hybrid forms of intellectual engagement that defy conventional geopolitical frameworks. The book’s strength lies not only in its original and ambitious conceptual framework, but also in its rigorous, sensitive interpretations of cultural artifacts in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Through a series of chronologically arranged case studies, Ma examines figures as diverse as Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Futabatei Shimei, and Lu Xun. Transpatial Modernity thus illuminates both the overlooked role of Russia as a cultural interlocutor for China and the crucial function of Japan as an intermediary, emphasizing a triangular rather than bidirectional model of transcultural exchange. By charting these neglected cultural circuits, the book expands the map of global modernism and offers a timely corrective to Eurocentric and nation-based models of literary history. Meticulously researched and lucidly written, Transpatial Modernity makes a vital contribution to Russian and Slavic studies, East Asian studies, comparative literature, and global intellectual history. 

Winner: Samuel Hodgkin

Prize Committee: Maria Taroutina (chair), Rory Finnin, and Jane Costlow