Todd Reeser, a professor in the Dietrich School's Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures and the director of the school's Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program, was recently awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize by the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) for his book Setting Plato Straight (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015). The prize, which recognizes the best book of the year in Renaissance Studies, was presented during the RSA's annual meeting in April.
In their citation, the Gordan Book Prize Committee stated, "In Setting Plato Straight, Reeser offers us a superbly nuanced, game-changing study of the history of sexuality through the lens of Renaissance translations of Plato. Reeser's close readings of a wide range of continental texts are lucid and sophisticated, and his philological work is exemplary throughout. The book does an exceptional job of attending with care and rigor to both sexuality and hermeneutics (as well as to their intersection). The book has broad and significant implications for Renaissance studies. Scholars interested in humanism and humanist reading practices, Renaissance translation and philology, and the use of queer theory as a heuristic for Renaissance texts will all find the book engaging, challenging, useful, and even entertaining. For its combination of technical mastery and boundary breaking conceptual work, the committee enthusiastically awards the Gordan Prize to Setting Plato Straight."