PVAMU's Riya Das Secures NEH Grant to edit Groundbreaking Feminist Novel

Prairie View A&M University News

Riya Das, Ph.D., has been awarded $30,000 in grant funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Das is an assistant professor of English in the Samuel Brailsford College of Arts and Sciences at Prairie View A&M University.

The grant will significantly support the preparation of the first critical edition of Mona Caird’s feminist novel, The Daughters of Danaus (1894), which is under contract at Edinburgh University Press. This funding will enable Das to write a critical introduction to the novel, edit its text, and add annotations informed by the fin-de-siècle context as well as relevant scholarly criticism. Additionally, Das will prepare an appendix featuring polemical essays by Mona Caird on socio-economic issues, such as “The Emancipation of the Family” and “Phases of Human Development,” and compile a comprehensive bibliography of sources. Publishing a critical edition of The Daughters of Danaus is essential not only to bring the novel back into print and facilitate readership but also to situate it within current scholarship on British literature, gender, and empire.

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