2025 ASEEES Prize Winners Announced

ASEEES congratulates the 2025 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: Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania)  
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press) 

Winner: Masha Salazkina (Concordia University)  
Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (University of California Press) 

Honorable Mention: Agnieszka Pasieka (University of Montreal) 
Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press) 

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: Samuel Hodgkin (Yale University) 
Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press) 

Honorable Mention: Xiaolu Ma (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) 
Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880–1930) (Harvard University Asia Center) 

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: Samuel J. Hirst (Bilkent University) 
Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press) 

Honorable Mention: Maria Cristina Galmarini (College of William & Mary) 
Ambassadors of Social Progress: A History of International Blind Activism in the Cold War (Northern Illinois University Press)

Honorable Mention: Radoslav Yordanov (Harvard University) 
Our Comrades in Havana: Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, 1959–1991 (Stanford University Press) 

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: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (University of California, Santa Barbara) 
Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press) 

Winner: Katya Motyl (Temple University) 
Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894-1934 (University of Chicago Press) 

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

Winner: Simon Morrison (Princeton University)  
Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer (Yale University Press) 

Winner: Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania)  
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press)

Honorable Mention: Jeffrey S. Hardy (Brigham Young University) 
Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System (Oxford University Press) 

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

Winner: Karen Underhill (University of Illinois Chicago) 
Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press)

Honorable Mention: Agnieszka Pasieka (University of Montreal) 
Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press) 

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: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (University of California, Santa Barbara) 
Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press) 

Winner: Polly Zavadivker (University of Delaware) 
A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I (Oxford University Press) 

Honorable Mention: Masha Kirasirova (New York University Abu Dhabi) 
The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire (Oxford University Press) 

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

Winner: Anne O’Donnell (New York University) 
Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press) 

Honorable Mention: Nataliya Kibita (University of Oxford) 
The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press) 

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

Winner: Waitman Wade Beorn (Northumbria University) 
Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv (University of Nebraska Press) 

Honorable Mention: Eugene Finkel (Johns Hopkins University) 
Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books) 

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: Henry Thomson (Arizona State University)
Watching the Watchers: Communist Elites, the Secret Police and Social Order in Cold War Europe (Cambridge University Press)

Honorable Mention: Michele Rivkin-Fish (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 
Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (Vanderbilt University Press) 

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: Jessie Barton Hronešová (University College London) 
“The uses of victimhood as a hegemonic meta-narrative in eastern Europe,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 32,2 (2024): 442-458 

Honorable Mention: Monika Rice (Lafayette College) 
“Dr. Arnold Mostowicz: ‘Not alone in space.’ Moral Injury and the Quest for extraterrestrial Redemption,” Jewish Culture and History 25,4 (2024): 601-631 

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

Winner: Emma Larson (Princeton University), “Day of Abolition of Kalym in the Kazakh ASSR, 1924-1932″

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 

Honoree: Robert H. Davis (Columbia University/Cornell University) 

Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award for eminent members of the profession who have made major contributions to the field through scholarship of the highest quality, mentoring, leadership, and/or service.

Honoree: Edith W. Clowes (University of Virginia)