Dr. Rebecca Rosen awarded Richard Beale Davis Prize

MURRAY, Ky. – Dr. Rebecca M. Rosen, assistant professor of English at Murray State University, has been awarded the 2022 Richard Beale Davis Prize for her Early American Literature (EAL) article “The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven’: Speaking and Discovering Infanticide in the Early American Northeast." This award, presented by the Modern Language Association Early American Literature Forum, is given for the best article in each calendar year of EAL (in this case, for volume 57, 2022). 

The prize selection committee, comprised of Dr. Tara Bynum (University of Iowa), Dr. Ana Schwartz (University of Texas at Austin) and Dr. Michelle Sizemore (University of Kentucky), called the essay "riveting" in an Oct. 2 announcement of the award to the Society of Early Americanists. Discussing its claims, they noted that Rosen "draws attention to the dead body as authoritative material evidence after the Salem witch trials, earning cruentation (a postmortem test based on the belief that a murdered body would bleed in the presence of its murderer) a place in Puritan judicial inquiry tantamount to the spectral evidence in the Witch Trials. Rosen’s attentiveness to the archive of infanticide sermons and other execution literature, as well as her commitment to reading her sources against the louder words of the famous Mathers, demonstrate the force of the blood cry in stifling condemned women or else permitting their speech only in acts of self-condemnation. For the committee, this work could not have been more powerful or timely."

The official award citation will appear in the 59.1 issue of EAL, scheduled for publication in early 2024.