Scholar wins big for Holocaust project

A
UCLA scholar won a $1.5 million prize for a three-year project on the impact of the
Holocaust on American literature. The Mellon Foundation Award presented to English and literature professor Eric Sundquist is America’s largest in the humanities.Sundquist, 54, argued in his study that English-language books are largely responsible for “Americanizing” and universalizing
the Holocaust in the world’s consciousness.He is described by colleagues at Columbia and Harvard
universities as “the most productive American literature scholar of his
generation.” His book “Strangers in The Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust
America” won the Weinberg Judaic
Studies Institute Award last month from the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.