2021 Recipient

The Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies, established in 2019 and sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, recognizes a distinguished book in the field of Ukrainian studies that was published in the previous calendar year. Omeljan Pritsak was an esteemed scholar of Ukrainian history and the primary founder of the Harvard Ukranian Research Institute.

Winner: Andriy Zayarnyuk
Title: L’viv’s Uncertain Destination: A City and Its Train Terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev (University of Toronto Press)

The Pritsak Book Prize committee commends Andriy Zayarnyuk, author of L’viv’s Uncertain Destination: A City and Its Train Terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev, winner of the 2021 prize. Zayarnyuk’s stellar monograph offers a new spatial history of the urban space of L’viv by using the railway station as a transnational point of transfer, encounter, and entry into Ukraine’s inhabited worlds. The book features careful archival work and analysis of periodical literature and incorporates historiography in multiple languages and across fields of urban history, anthropology, labor history, and human geography. Zayarnyuk’s narrative leads us to rethink how the late imperial Habsburg and Romanov, Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet, interwar Polish, and Nazi German regimes produced, structured, and controlled urban space. Focusing on railway workers, the book also draws attention to the history of Lviv’s wage earners, who constituted the majority of the city’s adult population. Zayarnyuk ambitiously challenges the paradigm of a singular modernity, in Europe or elsewhere. He takes us on a trans-imperial tour of violence and resistance, the built infrastructural spaces of his home city, and the many language universes of Ukraine across several centuries.

Honorable Mentions: Oleksandra Wallo and Jessica Zychowicz