PHILADELPHIA -- Peter Stallybrass, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ann Rosalind Jones of Smith College have been named winners of the prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize award for their book "Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory."

The prize is awarded annually by the Modern Language Association for an outstanding scholarly book written by a member of the association.

"Since the MLA is the professional organization to which professors of English and modern languages must belong, the Lowell Prize is considered especially prestigious," said David Wallace, chair of Penn Department of English. "Some 90 books were submitted for this competition by the world's leading presses."

Wallace noted that Stallybrass is the second Penn professor to win the Lowell Prize in four years.

"Their book thinks out on what it might have meant to put on clothes in Renaissance society, on English stages and for portraiture," Wallace said. "Changes of clothes, associated with superficial whims of fashion, also effect and express deeper shifts of identity."

The book differentiates the social functioning and psychic force of clothing in the Renaissance from the modern assumptions of how clothes work. The book was published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press.

Stallybrass has been an English professor at Penn since 1988. He received his doctorate at the University of Sussex and taught at Dartmouth College before coming to Penn.

He has also co-authored " The Politics and Poetics of Transgression" with Allon White and edited numerous books on the Renaissance.