The 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize was awarded to Konstantina Zanou

The 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize was awarded to Konstantina Zanou's Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2018). 

The decision was unanimous and all members of the committee thought that the monograph's focus on seminal literary and political figures as a means of addressing liminality and the transnational context of nationalism offered an innovative way of understanding and reconsidering the 19th century in the Mediterranean. Most importantly, they all felt that Zanou’s work signals a path for Modern Greek and Mediterranean Studies today: it is a thoroughly researched monograph that draws on an impressive range of sources and takes Greece as a point of departure to address larger theoretical issues—and indeed it is a delight to read.  

The monograph traces the process of transition from empires to nation-states, with particular attention to the emergent vocabularies that struggled to account for this new reality. By highlighting the porousness of a liminal intellectual moment, Zanou expertly recovers a crucial time in the history of the Mediterranean and sheds new light on seminal literary and political figures whose complex stories had to be posthumously reworked in order to fit into national narratives. Moving between microhistory and macrohistory, Transnational Patriotism carves out a space where individual histories, political landscapes, and their inscription upon language serve to interrogate the content of patriotism in the long 19th century.

The Edmund Keeley Book Prize is awarded to an academic book dealing with modern Greece or a Hellenic theme published originally in the English language: https://www.mgsa.org/Prizes/bookprize.html