Past Award Recipients

Past Recipients of the Heldt Prize

2017

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies

Honorable Mention: Nancy Shields Kollmann, The Russian Empire, 1450-1801. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Honorable Mention: Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies

Jusová, Iveta & Jirina Šiklová, Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

Best translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's and gender studies

Nemec Ignashev, Diane, trans. The Kukotsky Enigma by Ludmila Ulitskaya. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's and gender studies

Zenovich, Jennifer A. "Willing the Property of Gender: A Feminist Autoethnography of Inheritance in Montenegro" Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 1 (2016): 28-46. DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2015.1113217.

2016

Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women's Studies

Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil's Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Cornell University Press, 2015).

Honorable Mention: Jennifer Suchland, Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2015).

Best Book by a Woman in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Lisa Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Honorable Mentions: Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Russia (Cornell University Press, 2016).

Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Cornell University Press, 2015).

Best Article in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Claire E. McCallum, "Scorched by the Fire of War: Masculinity, War Wounds and Disability in Soviet Visual Culture, 1941-65," Slavonic and East European Review 93 (2): 251-85.

2015

Best Book in Slavic and East European Women's Studies

Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Honorable mention: Kristen Ghodsee, The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe (Duke University Press, 2015).

Best Book by a Woman in Slavic and East European Studies

Luba Golburt, The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).

Honorable mention: Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (Basic Books, 2014).

Honorable mention: Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944-48 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Best Article in Slavic and East European Women's Studies

Anika Walke, "Jewish Youth in the Minsk Ghetto: How Age and Gender Mattered," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, 3 (Summer 2014): 535-62.

Honorable mention: Nadia Kaneva and Elza Ibroscheva, "Pin-ups, strippers and centerfolds: Gendered mediation and post-socialist political culture" European Journal of Cultural Studies 2015, vol. 18(2) 224-241.

Best Translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Olga Sedakova/ Caroline Clark, Ksenia Golubovich, Stephanie Sandler, In Praise of Poetry (Open Letter, 2014).

2014

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies

Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Honorable Mention: Madeleine Reeves, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies

Jenny Kaminer, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture. Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 2013.

Honorable Mention: Paula Michaels, Lamaze: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies

Francesca Stella, "Queer Space, Pride, and Shame in Moscow," Slavic Review, no. 3 (Fall 2013).

2013

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies

Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini, with the assistance of Dominique Moran, Gender, Geography, and Punishment. The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Honorable Mention: Louise McReynolds. Murder Most Russian. True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, 2013)

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies

Yana Hashamova, "War Rape: (Re)defining Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Nationhood" in Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova edited, Embracing Arms. Cultural Representation of Slavic and Balkan Women in War (Central European University Press, 2012)

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies

Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University, Bloomington, 2011)

Honorable Mention: Nancy Kollman, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Best translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies

Vladimir Propp. The Russian Folktale (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Translated and edited by Sibelan Forrester

2012

Best Book by a Woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies

Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege. The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton University Press, 2011)

Honorable Mention: Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Beth Holmgren, Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America (Indiana University Press, 2012)

Best Article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Agnès Kefeli, "The Tale of Joseph and Zulaykha on the Volga Frontier: The Struggle for Gender, Religious, and National Identity in Imperial and Post-Soviet Russia," Slavic Review 70, No. 2 (Summer 2011)

2011

Best Book by a Woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies

Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film & the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford University Press, 2010)

Honorable Mention: Sarah D. Phillips, Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2011)

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies: Eliyana R. Adler, In Her Hands

The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Wayne State University Press, 2011)

Honorable Mention: Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women's Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Best Article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Michelle Lamarche Marrese, "'The Poetics of Everyday Behavior' Revisited: Lotman, Gender, and the Evolution of Russian Noble Identity," Kritika 11, No 4 (fall 2010).

Best Translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Marian Schwartz for her translation of Ol'ga Slavnikova, 2017 (Overlook/Duckworth, 2010)

2010

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Kristen Ghodsee, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe, Princeton, 2010

Best Book by a Woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies

Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War, Cornell University Press, 2009

Best Article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies

Adi Kuntsman, "'With a Shade of Disgust': Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag," Slavic Review 68, No 2 (summer 2009)

2009

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Christine Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700-1917, Yale University Press, 2009

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies:

Olga Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow, Indiana University Press, 2009

Best translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov, including Annotated Translations by Boris Jakim, Judith Kornblatt, and Laury Magnus; Cornell University Press, 2009

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Stephanie Sandler, "Visual Poetry after Modernism: Elizaveta Mnatsakanova," Slavic Review 76, No. 3 (Fall 2008), 610-41

2008

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies:

Catherine Wanner, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Abby Schrader, "Unruly Felons and Civilizing Wives: Cultivating Marriage in the Siberian Exile System, 1822-1860," Slavic Review vol. 66, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 230-56.

2007

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies:

Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom, The Land and Its Meaning traces (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 2007).

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Diana Greene, "The Menagerie or the Visitor's Pass? Aleksandra Zrazhevskaia and Praskov'ia Bakunina on Russian Women Writers," Carl Beck Papers (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2007.)

2006

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies:

Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 (Yale University Press, 2006).

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Michele Rivkin-Fish, Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Indian Unviersity Press, 2005).

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Elizabeth Jones Hemenway, "Mothers of Communists-Women Revolutionaries and the Construction of a Soviet Identity" in Helena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux, eds., Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006)

Best translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Sibelan Forrester, American Scream: Palindrome Apocalypse (Ooligan Press, 2005).

2005

Best book by a woman in any area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies:

Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Shana Penn, Solidarity's Secret: The Women who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, 2005).

Best article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies:

Michele Rivkin-Fish, "'Change Yourself and the Whole World Will Become Kinder': Russian Activists for Reproductive Health and the Limits of Claims Making for Women," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2004): 281-304.

Past Outstanding Achievement Award Recipients

  • Professor Natalia L'vovna Pushkareva (2017)
  • Dr. Lisa Kirschenbaum (2016)
  • Dr. Sarah Phillips (2015)
  • Diane Koenker (2014)
  • Elena Gapova (2013)
  • June Pachuta Farris (2012)
  • Marina Goldovskaya (2011)
  • Mihaela Miroiu (2010)
  • Beth Holmgren (2009)
  • Christine Worobec (2008)
  • Gitta Hammarberg (2007)
  • Nadia Azhgikhina (2006)
  • Brenda Meehan (2005)
  • Anna Lisa Crone (2004)
  • Adele Lindenmeyr (2003)
  • Stephanie Sandler (2002)
  • Olga Yokohama (2001)
  • Janet Rabinowitch (2000)
  • Diana Burgin (1999)
  • Patricia Herlihy (1998)
  • Helena Goscilo (1997)
  • Barbara Engel (1996)

Mary Zirin Prize Past Recipients

  • Olga Bukhina (2017)
  • Dr. Margaret Samu (2016)
  • Dr. Rosamund Bartlett & Dr. Ellen Elias-Bursac (2015)
  • Galina Mardilovich (2014)
  • Carolyn J. Pouncy (2013)
  • Susan N. Smith (2012)
  • Stepanka Korytova (2011)
  • Marilyn Schwinn Smith (2010)
  • Elena Shulman (2009)
  • Pavla Frýdlová (2008)
  • Lisa Alzo and Virginia Parobek (2002)
  • Linda Edmondson and Sonia Ketchian (2001)
  • Judith Vowles (2000)
  • Elena Ivanovna Trofimovna and Kazimiera Janina Cottam (1999)

Graduate Research Prize Past Recipients

  • Tatiana Rabinovich, Ph.D. Candidate in Critical Studies in Modern Middle Eastern Culture and Society at the University of Arizona. Rabinovich's dissertation,"Laboring on the Margins: Muslim Women, Precarity, and Potentiality in Russia," (2017)
  • Rebecca Hastings, PhD candidate in History at the University of Oregon (Major Advisor: Julie Hessler). Hastings's project, "Oil and Society in Azerbaijan, 1860-2015." (2016)
  • Margarita Safronova, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (2015)
  • Jessica Zychowicz, (Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan), to fund a trip to Kyiv to work with a local curator and feminist critic, as well as conduct archival research and a final round of interviews to complete her dissertation, "Superfluous Women: Gender, Art, and Activism After the Orange Revolution." (2013)
  • Agnieszka Zajaczkowska (PhD candidate, Law and Society, University of Victoria, BC), for interdisciplinary ethnographic fieldwork exploring the decision-making processes pertaining to women's involuntary admissions to psychiatric institutions in Poland. (2011)
  • Roland Clark, History, University of Pittsburg (2009)
  • Dorota M. Lech, research on Poland's response to sex trafficking reforms (2007)
  • Simone Ispa-Landa, master's thesis research, "Suspended Causality: Cultures of Intimacy among Two Cohorts of Russian Women" (2005)
  • Ania Plomien, research on the integration of East European countries into the European Union and its consequences for the status of women in those countries (2003, as "Pre-dissertation Prize" as the prize was previously titled)

Graduate Essay Prize Past Recipients

  • Ania Aizman, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, for her essay, "The Considerable Anarchism of the Present Moment: Post-Soviet Russian Philosophy in Search of a New (Old?) Avant-Garde." (2017)
  • Joy Neumeyer, a Ph.D. student in History at the University of California at Berkeley, for her essay, "Brezhnev, Vysotsky, and the Death of Developed Socialism: A Tragic Farce in Five Acts." (2016)
  • Katarzyna Kaczmarska, "Russia, A Different Version of the International," a chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation, "The Politics of Representing the International: International Society and the Russian World." (2015)
  • Olga Sasunkevich of European Humanities University, Vilnius, for a dissertation chapter written at Greifswald University, Germany, entitled "Shuttle Trade and Gender Relations: Female World in a Provincial Border Town." (2014)
  • Steven Jug (University of Illinois) for "Hating and Killing: Defining Oneself Against Enemy and Non-Combatant Amidst Defeat, 1942," a chapter of his dissertation, All Stalin's Men? Soldierly Masculinities in the Soviet War Effort (2013)
  • Chiara Bonfiglioli (University of Utrecht), for "From Comrades to Traitors: The Cominform Resolution of 1948," which is chapter 5 of her recently defended dissertation, "Revolutionary Networks. Women's Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957)." (2012)
  • Maryna Y. Bazylevych, Ph.D., Anthropology, SUNY Albany, 2010, with the chapter "'Beautiful' Medicine and Feminism: Women and the Practice of Post-socialist Biomedicine in Millennial Ukraine" from her recently defended dissertation. (2010)
  • Faith C. Hillis, Ph.D., History, 2009, Yale University, "State, Society, and Capitalism in the Southwest Borderlands" (chapter 1 from her dissertation, "Between Empire and Nation: Urban Politics, Community, and Violence in Kiev, 1863-1907") (2009)
  • Anna Kuxhausen, "The Modern Miracles of Breastfeeding: Raising the Nation on Mothers' Milk" (2007)
  • Anna Urasova, "Saving Private Sychev: Russian Masculinities in Crisis" and Jelena Subotic, "Confronting the Past When the Past Is Not Yet Over: Transitional Justice in Serbia" (2006)
  • Christina Vatulescu, "The Politics of Estrangement" (2005)
  • Elena Shulman, "'Bol'sheviki Were Never Ascetics!': Female Morale and Communist Morality" (2004)