MEDIA, Pa. — Lusine Mueller, a part-time instructor of English at Penn State Brandywine, was recently awarded the First-Degree Laureate Award from the All-Russian Society of Scientific Researchers in the 2026 International Competition of Research Works in Philological Sciences, referring to research of written or oral language in historical contexts. The award recognizes her article, “Michael Arlen’s 'The Green Hat': Reassessing the Impact a Hundred Years Later,” published in Literature of the Americas.
Mueller’s article examined the impact of Arlen’s novel, published in January 1924, on writing in the Jazz Age for the novel’s 100th anniversary.
“I am proud to be among a handful of scholars who have studied Michael Arlen’s works and published scholarly articles on them,” Mueller said. “It is the highest honor to be recognized as part of the small circle of literary critics who have devoted serious scholarly attention to Arlen.”
In the 1920s and 1930s, Arlen was the highest-paid author on both sides of the Atlantic. He was friends with other famous writers of the period, including Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. G. Wells and Nancy Cunard. The article that Mueller published traced the impact Arlen had on different literary figures, showing how some of the most famous writers of the Jazz Age borrowed ideas and motifs that he had developed in "The Green Hat."
Mueller wrote her article after writing a book on Arlen in 2012. Harry Keyishian, one of her mentors, encouraged her to continue her research on Arlen.
“Michael Arlen’s son, Michael John Arlen, wrote the preface of my book. I was fortunate to be granted exclusive interviews with him about his father’s work,” she said. “Michael John Arlen is famous in his own right as a television critic for The New Yorker and for winning the National Book Award in 1975 for his book 'Passage to Ararat.' I subsequently published some of those exclusive interviews.”
Mueller explained that Keyishian was the leading scholar in Arlen studies.
“His support always meant a great deal to me,” she said. “In 2023, a literary critic from England named Philip Ward published [Keyishian’s] book on Michael Arlen, 'Encounters with Michael Arlen.' He cited my work and listed me, among other scholars, in his acknowledgments as someone who had greatly contributed to the study of Arlen.”