Earlier this month, in Milan, the International Balzan Prize Foundation presented its annual awards, and Collège de France professor Michel Zink (left) received a prize of one million Swiss francs (about $827,000) for his work on medieval French and Occitan literature, "a decisive chapter in the development of modern European literature." Zink will be coming to the United States next spring, as a guest scholar at the University of Chicago, where fellow Romance scholar Daisy Delogu describes him as "the principal living figure in medieval French literary studies." In one of his more widely known works, translated into English as The Invention of Literary Subjectivity, Zink, according to one reviewer, "builds a case for the appearance of literary subjectivity in texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."