2013 Recipient

Ronald Grigor Suny

Established in 1970, the Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award honors eminent members of the profession who have made major contributions to the field through scholarship of the highest quality, mentoring, leadership, and/or service. The prize is intended to recognize diverse contributions across Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Honoree: Ronald Grigor Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History and Director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago

Professor Suny is a world-renowned historian and political scientist with an admirable breadth of interests across the Eurasian field in both spatial and temporal terms. He is particularly noted for his studies of the Caucasus in the Soviet and post-Soviet period: he was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan (1981-1995), and the founder and director of the Armenian Studies Program there.  He is the author of seven scholarly monographs, including The Baku Commune, 1917-1918 (Princeton University Press, 1972); The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat:  Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993); The Revenge of the Past (Stanford University Press, 1993); and The Soviet Experiment (Oxford University Press, 1998). He is also the editor of many collections of essays, including Making Workers Soviet (Cornell University Press, 1994); A State of Nations:  Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2001); and A Question of Genocide:  Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2011).  Professor Suny’s provocative and pioneering work on nationalism is an obligatory citation not just across the Eurasian studies field, but also beyond, and he has recently also made contributions to the developing field of history of emotions.

Professor Suny has served as chairman of the Society for Armenian Studies. He has also served on the editorial boards of Slavic Review, International Labor and Working-Class History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, The Armenian Review, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, Armenian Forum, and Ab Imperio.  He was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for the year 2006. Regarded by affection by former students and colleagues alike, he is a model of collegiality, and an exemplum, in the truly international scope of his interests, for the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in its post-Soviet and post-Cold War present.

Photo provided by: Joel Mason-Gaines, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum