Past Award Recipients

Past Recipients of the Heldt Prize

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

  • Barbara Engel (1996)
  • Helena Goscilo (1997)
  • Patricia Herlihy (1998)
  • Diana Burgin (1999)
  • Janet Rabinowitch (2000)
  • Olga Yokohama (2001)
  • Stephanie Sandler (2002)
  • Adele Lindenmeyr (2003)
  • Anna Lisa Crone (2004)
  • Brenda Meehan (2005)
  • Nadia Azhgikhina (2006)
  • Gitta Hammarberg (2007)
  • Christine Worobec (2008)
  • Beth Holmgren (2009)
  • Mihaela Miroiu (2010)
  • Marina Goldovskaya (2011)

Mary Zirin Prize Past Recipients

  • Elena Shulman (2009)
  • Marilyn Schwinn Smith (2010)

Elena Shulman is an independent scholar and the author of the superb and highly readable Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East (Cambridge University Press 2008). The book examines the Khetagurovite movement of idealistic female migrants to the Far East during the high tide of Stalinism. In the best tradition of women's history and gender-aware work, Shulman makes readers rethink the Soviet frontier and Stalinism itself, through the lens of this heretofore unexplored phenomenon. The Mary Zirin Prize committee looks forward to witnessing and consuming her continued production.

Pavla Frýdlová (2008)

Pavla Frýdlová is an independent scholar from the Czech Republic, the co-founder and first vice-president of the Czech Oral History Association founded in January 2007, and the co-founder of the Gender Studies Center in Prague, Czech Republic.

She is also the international coordinator and director of the "Women's Memory" project, whose purpose is "searching for Identity under Socialism." The project involves collecting oral histories of women from three generations who were born between 1920 and 1960.

As coordinator of the project, Pavla Frýdlová interacts with representatives from her own Czech Republic and from Slovakia, former East Germany, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Ukraine. She is also responsible for the project archives. So far, the project has yielded 500 interviews, 20,000 pages of transcription, three documentary movies, several radio programs, and 20 published books, four of which were edited by Pavla herself.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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)