Thursday, July 18, 2024
2024 ASEEES Distinguished Contributions Award Announced
2024 ASEEES DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTIONS HONOREE
Lewis Siegelbaum
ASEEES is pleased to announce that the 2024 ASEEES Distinguished Contributions Award is presented to Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University.
A social historian of extraordinary breadth, a supportive mentor to many cohorts of graduate students and early career scholars, a steadfastly generous colleague, and a firm believer in bringing history and historical analysis to a broader audience, Lewis Siegelbaum embodies the qualities celebrated by the ASEEES Distinguished Contributions Award. His sweeping set of publications, from monographs to memoirs and from conference volumes to collections of historical documents, reflects theoretical sophistication, lively empirical detail, and engagingly crafted prose. A highly productive scholar often operating at the cutting edge of developments in the field, Dr. Siegelbaum has carried out path-breaking work on wide-ranging topics from Stakhanovism to Soviet state responses to disability to the Soviet car industry and the complex relationship between communism and consumerism. His scholarship is frequently collaborative; his regular co-authorship and promotion of younger scholars’ work in edited volumes has enriched the scholarly landscape of Soviet history.
His impressive body of work includes: Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992, co-edited with Daniel J. Walkowitz (SUNY Press, 1995); Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, co-edited with Andrei Sokolov (Yale University Press, 2000); Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell University Press, 2008); Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019); Making National Diasporas: Soviet Migration Regimes and Post-Soviet Consequences, co-authored with Leslie Page Moch (Cambridge University Press, 2023); and Reflections on Stalinism, co-edited with J. Arch Getty (Cornell University Press, 2024).
Dr. Siegelbaum is renowned for his close and continuous mentorship of graduate students and for building their mutual sense of community by, for example, holding a monthly kruzhok and supporting MSU’s annual graduate student conference on Migration With(out) Boundaries. Never attempting to reproduce himself in his students, he has instead helped them flourish as themselves. He has supervised more than a dozen dissertations on topics as diverse as US-Soviet relations, ballet, and migration. Dr. Siegelbaum’s career is also distinguished by his role in fostering public understanding, from co-founding the key digital resource and teaching tool, “17 Moments in Soviet History,” to documenting the paradigm-shifting Donbas miners’ strikes of 1989 for public television. Finally, he has been a dedicated contributor to the profession, chairing ASEEES prize committees, serving on editorial boards, and lending his insights to the Midwest Russian History Workshop for decades.
For the depth and breadth of his professional achievements, ASEEES is proud to honor Dr. Lewis Siegelbaum with the Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award.
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.