The Modernist Studies Association (MSA) has awarded Randolph-Macon College English professor Robert Volpicelli its First Book Prize, which acknowledges first books by new authors that make a significant contribution to modernist studies.

Volpicelli’s book, Transatlantic Modernism and the U.S. Lecture Tour, was one of forty that were nominated for the award, one of eight finalists, and was announced as a co-winner with Joanna Pawlik’s Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940-1978 at the MSA conference in Portland, Ore., in October.

“This award really feels like a culminating event for me,” Volpicelli said. “A scholarly book is the product of a great deal of care—you have to care enough about your subject to spend years and years researching and writing about it. It means a lot to me that the end result resonated with other scholars in my field.”

The MSA is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. Transatlantic Modernism and the U.S. Lecture Tour explores international modern authors who traveled through America on the U.S. lecture tour and how “the circuit” brought those writers into contact with a surprisingly wide variety of American audiences.

The award judges praised the book’s unique angle, writing that “Volpicelli’s book opens up a new world of modernist literature: the celebrity circuit of early-twentieth-century lecture-tours…With a deft handling of materials and a strong voice, Volpicelli maneuvers the reader through this little-examined archive of modernism at its height, and its compromises with mass culture and celebrity that to us seem unimaginable.”

Since the book’s publication, Volpicelli has spoken at Columbia University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Hampden-Sydney College, with upcoming virtual book talks hosted by Oxford University and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.