Monday, September 16, 2024

2024 ASEEES Prize Winners Announced

ASEEES congratulates the 2024 prize winners and honorable mentions for their outstanding scholarship and contributions to the field. 

Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences 

• Winner: Egor Lazarev, State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press, 2023) 

University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies 

• Winner: Masha Salazkina, World Socialist Cinema Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Talar Chahinian, Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse University Press, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Brian K. Goodman, The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain (Harvard University Press, 2023) 

Barbara Jelavich Book Prize for a distinguished monograph published on any aspect of Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 1600, or nineteenth and twentieth-century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history 

• Winner: Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) 

Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history 

• Winner: Nicole Eaton, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell University Press, 2023) 
• 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) 
• Honorable Mention: Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko, In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) 

Ed A Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia, and/or Eastern Europe 

• Winner: Ekaterina Pravilova, The Ruble: A Political History (Oxford University Press, 2023) 

Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for outstanding monograph on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography 

• Winner: Greta Uehling, Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine (Cornell University Press, 2023)
• Honorable Mention: Egor Lazarev, State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• Honorable Mention: Bogdan Popescu, Imperial Borderlands: Institutions and Legacies of the Habsburg Military Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies for a distinguished book in the field of Ukrainian studies 

• Winner: 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) 
• Honorable Mention:  John R. Staples, Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2023)

Marshall Shulman Book Prize for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe 

• Winner: Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023)
• Winner: Louis Howard Porter, Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023) 

W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize for an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past 

• Winner:  Fabian Baumann, Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Una Bergmane, Politics of Uncertainty: The United States, the Baltic Question, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Nicole Eaton, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad (Cornell University Press, 2023) 

Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies for the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs 

• Winner: Sarah A. Cramsey. Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946 (Indiana University Press, 2023) 

Beth Holmgren Graduate Student Essay Prize for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 

• Winner: Silviya Nitsova, “Oligarchic Networks of Influence and Legislatures in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Ukraine” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Mikhail Svirin, “Counter-Monuments, Counter-Narratives: Grassroots Commemoration of Shuttle Traders in Post-Soviet Space” (Miami University, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: John Webley, “Face-Off: A Russian Prince at the Courts of India” (Yale University, 2023) 

Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize for an outstanding English-language doctoral dissertation in Soviet or Post-Soviet politics and history in the tradition practiced by Tucker and Cohen, defended at an American or Canadian university 

• Winner: Paula Chan, “Eyes on the Ground: Soviet Investigations of the Nazi Occupation” (Georgetown University, 2023) 
• Honorable Mention: Hilary Rybeck Lynd, “Homelands: Together and Apart in the Soviet Union and South Africa” (UC Berkeley, 2023) 

Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia Article Prize for an outstanding English-language research article in the social sciences by a junior scholar published in a peer-reviewed journal 

• Winner: Isaac McKean Scarborough, “Like Cooking Plov with Hoja Nasreddin: Recalculating Financial Transfers to Tajikistan, 1971–1989,” Europe-Asia Studies 75:6 (2023)    

CLIR Distinguished Service Award for librarians, archivists or curators whose contributions to the field of Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies librarianship have been especially noteworthy or influential 

• Awardee: Jon Giullian, Librarian for Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Head of International Collections, University of Kansas Libraries 

Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award 

• Awardee: Lewis Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History, Michigan State University 

ASEEES prize winners will be recognized at the award ceremony on Saturday, November 23, 2024 at the Annual Convention. Full citations will be available in the convention program and on the website in November.