Shaj Mathew Wins the Middle East Center Undergraudate Essay Award 2014
The annual Middle East Center Undergraduate Essay Award continues to draw attention to study of the region among Penn students. This year's award winner Shaj Mathew is a senior Comparative Literature major at Penn, where he studies English, Spanish, and Middle Eastern literatures. An Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum for the past two years, he has also published articles, essays, and literary criticism in The New York Times, The New Inquiry, Lapham's Quarterly, Guernica, and Sports Illustrated. In the fall, he will begin a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale. Shaj's essay was entitled Peripheral Peoples: Istanbul on the Margins of Modernity in Orhan Pamuk’s the Museum of Innocence offers a critical reading of Nobel laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.