Wednesday, December 10, 2025

ASEEES Launches the Alfred J. Rieber Dissertation Research Grant Fund

ASEEES is pleased to launch a fund for a Dissertation Research Grant in memory of the late Alfred J. Rieber, who passed on September 9, 2025.

As part of the Next Generation Emergency Research Support Fund campaign, the Alfred J. Rieber Dissertation Research Grant Fund will provide grants with a stipend of $6,000 to graduate students at U.S. universities to conduct doctoral dissertation research in Eastern European and Eurasian history. To learn more about the ASEEES Dissertation Research Grant program, click here.

Alfred J. Rieber (1931-2025), Professor Emeritus from University of Pennsylvania and University Professor Emeritus from Central European University, was a man of many talents, from his numerous scholarly monographs to his four historical novels.  He considered himself a historian already in his youth, reveling in stories from his grandparents and compiling scrapbooks on World War II while a high school student. Among his various fellowships, his editorial and administrative positions, and his book prizes, he cherished his teaching awards and always believed in the importance of teaching undergraduates as well as graduate students.  He won the Lindbach Teaching Award at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and the E. Hanis Harbison National Award of Danforth Foundation for the Ten Best Teachers in the United States in that same decade.  At Central European University he was voted by the students as Professor of the Year in 1997 and 1998. His students honored him with two Festschrifts, Extending the Borders of Russian History  and  Imperial Designs, Postimperial Extremes: Studies in Interdisciplinary and Comparative History of Russia and Eastern Europe, for his 70th and 90th birthdays. And in return he dedicated his last monograph, Storms over the Balkans during the Second World War, “to my students on two continents.”

In surveys of University of Pennsylvania alumni, Rieber has been named as one of the great lecturers at Penn. Thus it is fortunate that, due to the kindness of Jim Heinzen, the audio version of Rieber’s lectures from his course in  the spring of 1991 – “From Lenin to Gorbachev” – is being uploaded in digitized form at the University of Pennsylvania archives. In his 2024 lecture he discusses his own experiences as An American in the Soviet and Russian Archives.  In addition to the obituary by Michael David-Fox, tributes are forthcoming from Ab Imperio and Kritika.  Alfred J. Rieber would have considered it a great honor for contributions in his name to support future historians of the region.