Winner of AWSS Graduate Student Essay Prize in 2001

[Sibelan Forrester]

The Graduate Essay Prize Committee of the Association for Women in
Slavic Studies is pleased to announce the winner of this year's
Graduate Essay Prize, Kelly Miller, who received the award at the
luncheon meeting on Saturday, November 17, at AAASS in Crystal City.

This year's submissions were greater than ever in number (23),
written by both men and women, and covered a heartening range of
disciplines, themes, and institutions.

Kelly Miller's essay, "Iconography of the Poet as Intercessor:  The
Russian Painting Subtexts in 'Requiem'," is a chapter from her
dissertation, "Painting and the Poetry of Anna Akhmatova."  Miller's
essay is beautifully written, clear and persuasive.  She treats the
intersection of aesthetics and ethics with grace and insight.  Her
sources are impressively broad in range, while her own
interpretations are strikingly original.  Miller meticulously and
compellingly demonstrates the connections between Akhmatova's Requiem
and the artistic works identified, as well as Nikolai Punin's
writings, and her discussion of the poema in terms of the
iconostasis, as an artistic monument of Russian courage composed of
beauty, suffering, faith and love, is powerful and elegantly focused.
The members of the committee all felt that we learned a great deal
from this essay, and we look forward to encountering more of Kelly
Miller's scholarship.

Miller is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where she expects to defend her dissertation next year.

Respectfully submitted for the Committee (Hilary Fink, William G.
Wagner, Sibelan Forrester),

Sibelan Forrester
AWSS Past President (2001-2002)
Swarthmore College

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