On behalf of PAMLA’s Pacific Coast Philology Award Committee, we are honored to inform our community that Alix Mazuet’s essay, “The French Revolution and the Dismantlement of the Old Regime’s Private Libraries,” published in Pacific Coast Philology (Vol. 52, No. 2, 2017) has been chosen as the winner of PAMLA’s  inaugural Pacific Coast Philology Outstanding Article Award for 2018. Pacific Coast Philology (PCP), the journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, has been a leading literary and cultural studies journal, publishing peer-reviewed essays of interest to scholars in the classical and modern languages, literatures, and cultures for over fifty years. PCP publishes two annual issues on a wide array of timely, thought-provoking topics in the areas of culture, literature, aesthetics, ideology, film, and theory.

Alix Mazuet’s Award-winning article “concentrates on French cultural history in the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, the dismantling of the Old Regime’s private libraries that took place in the 1790s, and its effects on the nineteenth-century space of knowledge. Carefully tracing the process through which these libraries were “put in the hands of the Nation,” the article describes the immense difficulties the main actors involved in the dismantlement were faced with, as texts and documents had greatly deteriorated, were stolen, lost, or destroyed. At the same time, however, and throughout France, a tremendous number of the seized texts and documents were restored, cataloged, and sent to Paris. This body of written knowledge constitutes the collections and holdings that became available in the first public libraries that opened in France in the nineteenth century. From this standpoint, the dismantlement can be understood in terms of interplaying discontinuities, constancies, and transformations.”

Alix is a lecturer of French at Stanford University, and has been an active and outstanding PAMLA member for many years. Our committee spent a considerable amount of time deliberating, and we are proud to say that we chose Alix’s engaging, innovative, and knowledgeable article as an exemplar of the intellectual, academic writing we strive to publish. Congratulations, Alix!

We greatly appreciate the academic dedication and intellectual rigor of Alix’s article, and encourage all of our members to read her article, found online via JStor or Project Muse, hopefully via your library’s website, or in your print issue. We also encourage PAMLA  members to submit essay proposals to Pacific Coast Philology. 

We hope that Alix’s article is widely read across our great academic community, and that this new award will encourage even more of our members to submit their scholarly articles to Pacific Coast Philology for consideration.

On behalf of PAMLA, we wish to thank this year’s Pacific Coast Philology Award Committee members, Yolanda Doub, Richard Hishmeh, Peter Schulman, and PAMLA Assistant Director David John Boyd. PAMLA thanks the committee and Alix Mazuet for all of their outstanding work!