UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Julie Park, Paterno Family Librarian for Literature at Penn State University Libraries and professor of English, has received the American Library Association’s (ALA) prestigious Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award for 2024, for her book “My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England.”
Park’s “My Dark Room” is among a selective list — approximately 10% of some 5,000 reviewed works — designated as Outstanding Academic Titles (OAT) chosen from the previous year, representing the best in scholarly publishing in both print and digital formats. The titles are selected by the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the ALA, and elicit extraordinary recognition within the academic library community. Selected titles must demonstrate overall excellence in scholarship and presentation, and importance in relation to other literature in the field, as well as originality or uniqueness of treatment.
Park said the award has always been a mark of excellence for scholarly books and was meaningful for her to win.
“I’m aware that there are a vast number of other books out there in literary studies that are really good, so I feel especially honored and lucky,” she said. “I took risks in writing this book, and winning the award feels like further affirmation of the decisions I made to take these risks.”
In the March 2024 issue of CHOICE Connect, Park’s book was described as "stunningly original," "brilliantly argued," "eminently readable," and "utterly convincing," and judged as an "essential" (Choice's highest ranking) book title for a wide range of readers, from lower-level undergraduates through faculty to general readers.
In writing “My Dark Room,” Park said she embarked on a long intellectual journey that was self-directed and transformed by the many places she visited — from country houses, landscape gardens and camera obscuras to museums and private collections in the United States and Great Britain — and the scholars from different disciplines and institutions that she was fortunate enough to meet at the many special collections libraries she used.
"'My Dark Room' showed me that writing is something that you do as a function of living as a human being in material environments, in continual interaction with the material things you come to rely on to live your life,” said Park. “I learned this through both my historical research and through the experiences of my own life, which went through changes and took me to a lot of exciting and fascinating places, both literal and figurative, during the writing of the book."
Park is currently working on her next book “Writing’s Maker” (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), continuing to focus on the relationship between selfhood and the material culture of 18th-century England. With “Writing’s Maker," she said, she’s taking in a new direction the insight developed in "My Dark Room" about the reciprocal relationship between the interiority of 18th-century writing and the spaces where it took place.
“I’m asking now what writing itself was as a material practice of daily life, with historical writing tools and formats specific to the 18th century shaping its meaning and experience.”
In this way, said Park, “Writing’s Maker” will complete a trilogy of books on the self and different aspects of material culture begun with her previous books “The Self and It” (Stanford University Press, 2010) and “My Dark Room.”
Earlier this year, “My Dark Room” received honorable mention for the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize. Read more about the award, and Park, here.