ASEEES to Honor Scholars at its 2021 ASEEES Convention

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the leading private, non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and Eastern and Central Europe, will present its annual awards for Distinguished Contributions to area studies, ten book prizes, an outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Prize, Graduate Student Essay Prize, and award for distinguished service in Library Science on Saturday, November 20th 2021, during its 53rd Annual Convention held in New Orleans, LA at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.

The Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award honors eminent scholars who have made major contributions to the field through scholarship, mentoring, leadership, and service to the profession. The 2021 Honoree is Donald J. Raleigh, Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Donald J. Raleigh is a historian of exceptional thematic and methodological breadth. His early pioneering works on the Russian Revolution and Civil War have been described as “archival tours de force” and his more recent volumes on Soviet baby boomers set the highest standards for oral history. His work is justly celebrated for its attention to the reverberations of global events through local histories and individual lives. Such interest in the diversity of human experience allows Raleigh to find a fresh angle on his subject matter, and, over the course of his illustrious career, he has studied nearly every decade of Soviet history. Equally legendary is Raleigh’s reputation as a teacher and mentor. He has supervised well over fifty MA theses and PhD dissertations, and extended his intellectual support not only to graduate students and junior colleagues at his home institutions, but also to countless colleagues in Russia and the United States. ASEEES honors Professor Raleigh’s generosity of spirit and intellectual presence, which will continue to shape our field for years to come.

The following scholars will also be recognized for their contributions to the field:

The Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, awarded for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies will be presented to Ana Hedberg Olenina, (Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Media Studies at Arizona State University), for Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film. (Oxford University Press). Additionally, the Vucinich prize committee will give Honorable Mention to Ronald Grigor Suny, (William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago) for Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton University Press).

The USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies will be awarded to Carol Any, (Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College) for The Soviet Writers’ Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin (Northwestern University Press).

The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History will be awarded to two scholars: Krista A. Goff, (Assistant Professor of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Miami) for Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Union (Cornell University Press) and Anita Kurimay, (Assistant Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College) for Queer Budapest 1873-1961 (University of Chicago Press).

The Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year. This year’s prize will be awarded to Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, (Professor in the King’s Russia Institute at King’s College London) for The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (Oxford University Press). The committee also included an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Davis Center book prize: Kathryn Graber, (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington) for Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia (Cornell University Press)

The Ed A. Hewett Book Prize is awarded for an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe. This year, Fabio Mattioli, (Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne) for Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (Stanford University Press).

The Marshall D. Shulman Prize is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. This year's prize goes to Thane Gustafson, (Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at Georgetown University) for The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe (Harvard University Press).

Francine Hirsch, (Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) will be presented with the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, which is given for a distinguished monograph published on any aspect of Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 1600, or 19th- and 20th-century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history, for Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II (Oxford University Press). An Honorable Mention will be presented to Dominique Kirchner Reill, (Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Miami) for The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard University Press)

Molly Pucci, (Assistant Professor of Twentieth Century European History at Trinity College Dublin), will receive the Kulczycki Book Prize for Polish Studies for her book Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (Yale University Press). Adam Teller, (Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University) will also be recognized with Honorable Mention for his work Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton University Press).

The 3rd annual Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies will be awarded to Andriy Zayarnyuk, (Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg), for L’viv’s Uncertain Destination: A City and Its Train Terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev (University of Toronto Press). We are pleased to announce two Honorable Mentions this year: to Oleksandra Wallo, (Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas), for Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan (University of Toronto Press) and to Jessica Zychowicz, (Director of the US Fulbright Program in Ukraine and Head of IIE: Institute of International Education Kyiv Office), for Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First- Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press)

This year we are pleased to announce two recipients for the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize which is awarded for an author's first published monograph. The first recipient, Pey-yi Chu, (Associate Professor of History at Pomona College), for The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press); the second recipient is Greg Afinogenov, (Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University), for Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia's Quest for World Power (Harvard University Press).

This year’s Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize, sponsored by the KAT Charitable Foundation, is awarded to Virginia Carter Olmsted McGraw, for her dissertation, “Soviet by Design: Fashion, Consumption, and International Competition during Late Socialism, 1948-1982” (UNC, Chapel Hill, History).

The Beth Holmgren Graduate Student Essay Prize will be awarded to Moira O’Shea for “‘We Took the National Game and Turned It into a Sport:’ Playing Kok Boru and Re-Inventing Tradition in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan” (University of Chicago, Sociology).

Finally, The ASEEES Committee on Libraries and Information Resources will grant its CLIR Distinguished Service Award to two recipients who have both contributed to the strength of our field. Wojciech Zalewski, Curator for Slavic and East European Collections Emeritus and Bibliographer for Religious Studies at the Stanford University Libraries and Tatjana Lorkovic, Curator of the Slavic and East European Collections at Yale University Library, who is now retired.