Lisa Beth Voigt, associate professor, Spanish and Portuguese, was selected by the Modern Language Association (MLA) of America for its annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. Voigt’s book, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds, was singled out as an outstanding example of research that is both interdisciplinary and comparative and for its substantive contribution to history as well as literary studies. Voigt will be presented with her award on January 7, 2011 during the association's annual convention, to be held in Los Angeles.

Voigt’s teaching and research on colonial Latin American literature and culture address transatlantic and comparative issues, and include such topics as captivity and shipwreck narratives in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, mestizo historiography in New Spain, and Baroque festivals and creole identity in the Andes and Brazil.

The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies.