First Book Subvention Past Recipients
2024-Fall
Cornell University Press for An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film by Dustin Condren
University of Wisconsin Press for Women Under Suspicion: Fraternization, Espionage, and Punishment in the Soviet Union During World War II by Regina Kazyulina
2024-Spring
University of Toronto Press for Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan by Magdalena Stawkowski
University of Toronto Press for Subscribing to Sovietdom: The Lives of the Socialist Literary Journal by Philip Gleissner
2023-Fall
Cornell University Press for The Politics of Love: Gender and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Poland by Natalie Cornett
Cornell University Press for From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union by Susan C.I. Grunewald
2023-Spring
Northern Illinois University Press for Workflows: Stalinist Liquids in Russian Labor Culture by Maya Vinokour
University of Wisconsin Press for Charlottengrad: Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin by Roman Utkin
Pennsylvania State University Press for At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism by Polina Dimcheva Dimova
2022-Fall
University of Wisconsin Press for The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse by Pavel Khazanov
Cornell University Press for Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time by Antony Kalashnikov
2022-Spring
Northern Illinois University Press for Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991 by Kateryna Malaia
University of Wisconsin Press for Outlaw Music in Russia: The Rise of an Unlikely Genre by Anastasia Gordienko
Oxford University Press for Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination by Louis Porter
2021-Fall
University of Toronto Press for Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine by Emily Channell-Justice
2021-Spring
University of Toronto Press for In the Kingdom of Shoes: Bata, Zlin, and Globalization, 1894-1945 by Zachary Austin Doleshal
Cornell University Press for Unsettled Heritage: Living next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust by Yechiel Weizman
2020-Fall
Cornell University Press for Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture by Molly Thomasy Blasing
McGill-Queen’s University for Restless History: Political Imaginaries and Their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria by Zhivka Valiavicharska
Northwestern University Press for Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature by Ainsley Morse
2020-Spring
Cornell University Press for Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus by Krista A. Goff
Columbia University Press for Internationalist Aesthetics: The Role of China in Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman
2019-Fall
Northwestern University Press for Russia’s Capitalist Realism Historical Change and Narrative Form in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov by Vadim Shneyder
Cornell University Press for Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia by James Pickett
University of Wisconsin Press for A Spiritual Revolution: Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia, 1700–1825 by Andrey V. Ivanov
2019-Spring
University of Tornto Press for Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: from the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan by Oleksandra Wallo
Cornell University Press for Tales From Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania by Smoki Musaraj
2018-Fall
University of Toronto Press for Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue by Stanislav Shvabrin
University Press of Mississippi for Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons, 1954-1964 by John Etty
University of Toronto Press for Pushkin’s Monument and Allusion: Poem, Statue, Performance by Sidney Eric Dement
2018-Spring
Cornell University Press for Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia by Rachel Applebaum
Northern Illinois University Press for The Futurist Files: Avant-Garde, Politics and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 by Iva Glisic
University of Wisconsin Press for Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging by Chris Davis
2017-Fall
Cornell University Press for The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan by Sarah I. Cameron
Northwestern University Press for Mapping Warsaw: The Spatial Poetics of a Postwar City by Ewa Wampuszyc
University of California Press for Gan’s Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism by Kristin Romberg
University of Toronto Press for Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia by Caress Schenk
2017- Spring
Cornell University Press for From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World by Elidor Mëhili
Cornell University Press for Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 by Claire L. Shaw
University of Wisconsin Press for Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861-1881 by Lynn Patyk
2016- Fall
Cornell University Press for Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1917 by Ian W. Campbell
University of Toronto Press for Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine by Mayhill C. Fowler
University of Wisconsin Press for Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914 by Patrick Lally Michelson
2016- Spring
Central European University Press for Between Nation and Empire: Russian and Romanian Competing Visions of Bessarabia in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Century by Andrei Cusco
Indiana University Press for Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt by Larisa Jasarevic
University of North Carolina Press for The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Chris Miller
2015
Cornell University Press for Violence as a Generative Force by Max Bergholz
Indiana University Press for Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 by Charles Steinwedel
Northern Illinois University Press for Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840-1890 by Molly Brunson