Stephanie Bosch Santana receives book award from American Comparative Literature Association
Courtesy of Stephanie Bosch Santana (portrait), Northwestern University Press
Stephanie Bosch Santana’s first book, “Forms of Mobility,” was praised for its “creativity, precision and elegance.”
| March 4, 2026
For her first monograph, UCLA comparative literature professor Stephanie Bosch Santana examined a trove of thousands of fictional stories and articles in print periodicals and digital media from four nations in southern Africa.
Her aim: To examine how different literary genres have changed as they’ve traveled — over time and across the region’s geography — and to discover what the genres might reveal about how writers, editors and readers think about mobility and community.
The resulting book, “Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures” (Northwestern University Press, 2025), highlights evolving centers of literary influence from the mid-20th century through the present day in Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In it, Bosch Santana makes the case that five under-studied forms of fiction — migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, digital diaries and time machines, which use older print forms like the newspaper as vehicles for exploring new futures — reveal aspects of African and Black diasporas that have largely been ignored by world literature scholars.
Join Stephanie Bosch Santana for a free book talk presented by the Department of Comparative Literature, March 6 at 2:30 p.m. in Kaplan Hall 348. Registration is recommended.
For her work, Bosch Santana has received the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize, which recognizes the best comparative literature book by a first-time author. The award was presented Feb. 27 at the ACLA’s annual meeting in Montreal.
In its award citation, the prize committee lauded the book’s innovative premise and approach: “To study these materials, Bosch Santana shows, literary scholars must find ways to criss-cross print and digital media and to examine literary cultures at multiple scales, not to mention abandon any narrow generic and linguistic focus on the African novel in English or French. … ‘Forms of Mobility’ reimagines the maps and tools of literary comparison with admirable creativity, precision and elegance.”
Bosch Santana said the award was particularly meaningful because her book’s geographic and linguistic focus is outside of the field’s traditional European area of emphasis.
“What means a lot to me is that the book is focused on ideas of literary comparison that emerge from the Global South,” she said. “It’s a view of comparison that’s African– and African-diaspora–focused, and I hope having the comparative focus be located there will be meaningful for African literary studies.”
“Forms of Mobility” was published as part of Northwestern University Press’s FlashPoints series; Nouri Gana, a UCLA professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and cultures, is one of the series editors.