University of Iowa English Professor Claire Fox has received an honorable mention in the Modern Language Association of America’s annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for her book, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War. The prize recognizes an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures.

Fox has a joint appointment in the Departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese, both in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and is the co-director of the Latina/o Studies minor. Her teaching and research interests include literary and cultural studies of the Americas, Latina/o American literary and cultural studies, and Mexican and U.S.-Mexican border arts and culture. Fox is the author of The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border, editor of a special issue of Comparative American Studies, and coeditor of the forthcoming “Latino Midwest Reader.”

The Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize selection committee’s citation for Fox’s book reads:

“Claire F. Fox’s Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War offers an original account of the impact of Pan-Americanism in United States-Latin American cultural and diplomatic relations during the Cold War era. Fox also demonstrates how the idea of Latin American art was developed during the same period. Based on extensive archival research and an in-depth analysis of primary sources, Fox’s work makes a valuable contribution to the study of cultural policy, art institutions, and the circulation of intellectuals, artists, and artworks between the United States and Latin America from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. Interdisciplinary, hemispheric, and transnational in its scope, the book provides a fresh view of the place of the arts and culture in the broader intellectual history of the Americas during the twentieth century.”

The prize is one of 16 awards that will be presented on January 10, 2015, during the Modern Language Association of America’s annual convention, to be held in Vancouver.