Awards
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies is very pleased to announce the winners of its 2011 Prize Competitions.
Outstanding Achievement Award: Professor Marina Goldovskaya
AWSS is very pleased to announce internationally renowned filmmaker Marina Golodvskaya as this year's winner of the 2011 Outstanding Achievement Award. Marina Goldovskaya has made a unique and enormous contribution not only to Soviet/Russian documentary film, but also to the strengthening of the documentary genre world-wide, through her teaching at UCLA and her documentaries on non-Russian subjects as well as Russian ones. An acclaimed observational documentarian, Professor Goldovskaya has given documentary filmmaking in Russia a sense of the physical place and real time rarely found in film anywhere. She is the most important documentary filmmaker of her generation, and one of a handful of women in Russia who have successfully moved from other areas of film into directing.
AWSS is especially honored to recognize Professor Goldovskaya this year at the time of the appearance of her latest film, "A Bitter Taste of Freedom." The film candidly portrays her long-time, cherished friend and colleague, the late investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. In an assassination that produced international shockwaves, Politkovskaya lost her life, most probably for her pursuit of truth about war crimes against civilians in the two Chechnya wars. As "A Bitter Taste of Freedom" shows, Anna Politkovskaya was one of the few Russian journalists fearless enough to openly criticize the Putin regime. Marina Goldovskaya's portrait of the journalist is a passionate tribute to Politkovskaya's brave fight against authoritarianism and in support of freedom and openness, causes to which she as a filmmaker has contributed so much herself. AWSS celebrated Professor Goldovskaya at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies in Washington, DC, on Saturday, November 19, 2011 at both its annual awards luncheon and later that afternoon, at a roundtable and screening of "A Bitter Taste of Freedom."
Mary Zirin Prize for Independent Scholars: Dr. Stepanka Korytova
In a distinguished field of nominees, Stepanka Korytova stood out for both her innovative scholarship and a current research agenda that promises to make an important intervention in Slavic women's studies. Without benefit of a permanent academic home, Dr. Korytova has amassed an impressive record of scholarship, including monographs in both English and Czech on immigration to the United States from the Czech and Slovak lands. Demonstrating the organizational and human connections between communities in Europe and the U.S., she brings a fresh take to the history of U.S. immigration through her use of archives on both sides of the Atlantic. She complicates the story of the American immigrant experience by focusing our attention on immigrants as not only recipients of charitable aid for newcomers, but as providers of assistance to members in their communities.
Her interests in recent years have taken a new direction, one that concerns one of the world's most pressing human rights issues: global human trafficking. Like Mary Zirin, Korytova makes an important contribution to the field as a bibliographer with her forthcoming work, Global Human Trafficking. In support her current study of sex trafficking in Central and Eastern Europe, and in recognition of her past scholarly accomplishments, the AWSS 2011 Mary Zirin Prize committee is pleased to bestow this year's award on Dr. Korytova.
Heldt Prizes
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)
Cristina Vatulescu's Police Aesthetics is a thrilling work of scholarship; to borrow a suitable word from Vatulescu herself, it is "arresting." Drawing on her research in Russian and Romanian archives, she reveals the secret police as avid consumers and sometimes preservers of culture, as a poet's most attentive readers and listeners, and as producers or models for artistic production. The secret police dossier proves to be a genre with its own rules of composition, and many of the fiction and films of the socialist era reveal the shaping influence of police interrogations. Vatulescu finds telling evidence in files on important cultural figures such as Mikhail Bulgakov in the years when first-person narratives were the most dangerous kind of literature, and anyone might discover that his or her biography was being written by the secret police and pseudonymous informers. Clearly laid out, with beautifully integrated theory and fireworks of intellectual energy, the book yields insights into the life of any Socialist Bloc citizen who may have encountered the secret police -- and perhaps to all of us. Police Aesthetics offers both fascinating information and an unusually entertaining reading experience.
Honorable Mention: Sarah D. Phillips, Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2011)
Sarah Phillips has written a wonderful monograph on disability activists and their struggles for equal rights in Ukraine. This is a timely intervention in the new field of disability studies, bringing into view a region of the world underrepresented in the literature. Phillips situates the current conditions of possibility that face activists in historical perspective, revealing how Soviet policies, bureaucratic structures, and attitudes live on into the present. Phillips devotes a chapter to analyzing public representations of disability and the debates that shape the lives of the disabled. In another chapter, she explores the difficulties disabled people face in performing hegemonic gender identities, as well as the trials and tribulations associated with healthy sexual expression. Phillips consistently foregrounds the experiences of her interlocutors, using their voices and stories to structure the broader narrative. This approach reminds us continuously that people's lives are at stake, but also allows her to describe very different paths taken by activists and their families. This is a rich and nuanced study, wide-ranging thematically and significant politically.
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)
If you have ever wondered where those brilliant, articulate Jewish women, the ones who shaped so much of the discourse of the Russian fin-de-siècle, were before they began to write and publish, Eliyana Adler's book, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia, fills in large parts of the answer. The book is based on archival research into the more than 100 private schools for Jewish girls that opened in the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Adler reconstructs the chronologies, funding sources and enrollment numbers of the schools as well as analyzing the evolving discourse about educating girls and the place of educated women in Judaism. Fortified with rich tables of data and illustrations, Adler's book is suggestive of future directions for research and attentive to the context of scholarship on both Russian and Jewish education, as well as social history. This hugely informative book makes a great contribution to gender studies, Jewish studies, and the history of women's education.
Honorable Mention: Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution: Women's Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
Equality and Revolution is a very important contribution to the field of Women's Studies because it returns the suffrage debate and the politics over suffrage to a central place in Russian History. After decades of Soviet denigration of the so-called "bourgeois feminists," this is a revisionist history that restores their activities and achievements between 1905 and 1917 to their rightful place in the global fight for women's suffrage. Ruthchild's work demonstrates the connections between the Russian revolution of 1905 and Finnish women's success in gaining the right to vote in the first successful national women's suffrage movement. She also challenges the dominant notion that "privileged" Russian feminists did not engage with working women. By demonstrating the vitality and success of this cross-class women's suffrage movement, Ruthchild reinscribes Russian feminists into a historical narrative that has unjustly excluded them for far too long.
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).
"'The Poetics of Everyday Behavior' Revisited" is an ambitious, sophisticated, and well written piece of scholarship that poses a challenge to Iurii Lotman's seminal article on the post-Petrine nobility in two distinct ways. First of all, it uses the correspondence of men and women of the nobility (from thirty archival collections) to call attention to the self-fashioning and individual identities of noblewomen, whom Lotman had described as lacking in individual choice and closer in situation to peasants than to noblemen. While restoring agency to noblewomen, Michelle Marrese also challenges Lotman's notion of the post-Petrine noble as "a foreigner in his own country." She argues instead that the worldview of the elite was characterized by "cultural bilingualism," in which they moved comfortably between languages and cultures. Noblemen and women perceived participating in European culture while articulating Russian identities as natural and normal. Marrese uses women's correspondence to persuasively call into question one of the most long-standing historiographical traditions in Russian history.
Best Translation in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies: Marian Schwartz for her translation of Ol'ga Slavnikova, 2017 (Overlook/Duckworth, 2010)
Ol'ga Slavnikova's "2017" is a futuristic novel full of atmospherics and complex metaphors that are extraordinarily difficult to translate from Russian into English. Yet Marian Schwartz's translation of "2017" captures the dreamy, indeterminate aspects of the novel and conveys them flawlessly. The novel combines many different plot elements, from adventure to romance, folklore to dystopia. The translation beautifully captures the variegated linguistic aspects of all of these strands. Although the novel is far from straightforward, Schwartz makes its haziness clear and easy to read in this superb translation.
Graduate Essay Prize: 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.
The award winners were celebrated at the AWSS annual meeting and luncheon at the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies convention in Washington, DC, on Saturday, November 19, 2011.