2024

The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year. 

Honorable Mention: Serhiy Bilenky, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772–1914 (McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2023)

Laboratory of Modernity presents a powerful and elegantly written narrative of Ukrainian history from the late 18^th century to World War I. It is a model of synthetic and interpretive work that can be used by students, scholars, and the general public. Serhiy Bilenky effectively integrates Ukraine into world history by examining its cultural diversity and the interaction between empires and national projects, presenting it as a space where universal concerns of modernity played out. The book’s main strength is its new approach to studying Ukraine and Eastern Europe from the perspective of empires, which has broader implications for writing national histories that do not privilege the nation-centric mindset. Finally, featuring maps and a bibliographical essay, the book is an incredibly valuable resource for the region’s history and historiography. 

Honorable Mention: Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko, In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) 

Richly illustrated and brilliantly argued, Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko’s book In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos is a model of interdisciplinary research. Sarkisova and Shevchenko take the reader on a journey through the meanings of personal photographs from the Soviet era and what they tell us about experience, memory, and silences about the past. In Visible Presence pays particular attention to the stories Soviet citizens told about their photographs as well as the way certain stories had to remain unsaid: Both authors analyze their own family archives and the albums family members put together and preserved. With more than 250 photographs reproduced in the book, Sarkisova and Shevchenko’s study is an immersive examination of how Soviet photographs bear physical traces of the past and how these traces allowed families to exercise their historical imaginations across time. 

Winner: Nicole Eaton

Prize Committee: Aaron Retish (chair), Małgorzata Fidelis, and Stephen Norris