Shortlist: 2026 Caucus for Contingent and Independent Scholars Essay Prize (for essays published in 2025)

Sponsored by Clemson University Press

WINNER: Mia Florin-Sefton, “The Recognition of Loss in Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE,” Feminist Modernist Studies 8.2 (2025): 112–33.

In “The Recognition of Loss in Shola von Reihold’s LOTE,” Mia Florin-Sefton offers a beautifully crafted analysis of this contemporary novel’s intervention into modernist studies and historiography. Writing from the intersection of modernism and Black studies, her argument lays bare how fiction writers today engage with an archive that is absent due to the violence of systemic racism. Bypassing the questions of “when was modernism?” or “what counts as modernism?”, Florin-Sefton argues that LOTE offers a “powerful commentary on the violence of not seeing oneself represented in the modernist archive” while also using modernist aesthetics to render and rewrite the fiction trope of anagnorosis, Aristotle’s term for the epiphanic moment of self-recognition that is so often identity confirming. What follows is a stunning analysis of how Black feminist theorization of absences in the archive illuminates von Reinhold’s use of trite fiction tropes to ask what can an incomplete archive—and what can fiction—offer the reader who wants to name historic violence and loss. The committee was particularly impressed with Florin-Sefton’s complex and detailed theoretical framing, her invitation to think differently about modernism, and the general passion with which she wrote about this novel, one we all hope will make more of an appearance in modernist and modernist-adjacent syllabi.

Sean Weidman, “Dorothy Day’s Modernist Hospitality,” Twentieth Century Literature 71.3 (2025): 199–234.

Sean Weidman offers an exciting case for Dorothy Day’s modernism in “Dorothy Day’s Modernist Hospitality.” Weidman’s study of Day is compellingly grounded in extensive archival research. Making a claim that Day’s journalism and activism justify her place in the modernist canon, Weidman grounds Day’s focus on “hospitality” in her ties to Greenwich Village modernism and bohemian culture, arguing that Day’s charitable works were as much a product of her ties to literary communities as to the Catholic Church. Weidman’s analysis of Day’s literary output offers a wide-sweeping, genre-crossing approach to Day that documents her immersion in modernist literary circles and small magazines, as well as her growing dissatisfaction with the modernist movement’s inability to offer spiritual satisfaction in the face of rising poverty and systemic sexism. Though Day eventually turned to the Church for this fulfillment, Weidman argues that it was the failures of modernism that inspired Day’s construction of the societal support she imagined through her efforts in hospitality. In this article, Weidman offers a fascinating, elaborately researched, and elegantly argued profile of Day, whose career offers critics new methods to reconsider literary modernism’s relationship to contemporaneous journalism and social activism.

Nominating Committee:

Kate Schnur (Queens College, CUNY) (Chair)
Emily Bloom (Sarah Lawrence College)
A. Layne Craig (Texas Christian University)
Andrew Dorkin (Clemson University Press)
Dominique Townsend (Xavier University of Louisiana)