American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) Honors Slavic Scholars

[NewsNet]

CAMBRIDGE, MA ­ November 9, 2007 ­ The American 
Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 
(AAASS), the leading private, nonprofit 
organization dedicated to the advancement of 
knowledge about Russia, Central Eurasia, and 
Eastern and Central Europe, will present its 
annual awards on November 17, 2007, during the 
39th National Convention held at the New Orleans 
Marriott Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Two scholars receive the Association’s highest 
honor­the Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies Award:

Alexander M. Schenker, Professor Emeritus of 
Slavic Linguistics at Yale University, receives 
the award for “his important contributions to the 
field of Polish language and literature, for his 
further scholarly work in 18th-century cultural 
history, and for his pioneering role in shaping 
the development of Slavic linguistics as a 
scholarly field in the United States.”

Richard S. Wortman, James Bryce Professor of 
History at Columbia University, receives the 
award “in recognition of his extraordinary 
scholarly accomplishments and his lifelong 
dedication to the field of Russian history.”

The following scholars receive the Association’s 
book prizes for their recently published monographs:

Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor of 
Anthropology at University of California, 
Berkeley, receives the Wayne S. Vucinich Book 
Prize awarded for the most important contribution 
to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies 
in any discipline of the humanities or social 
sciences, for Everything Was Forever Until It Was 
No More: The Last Soviet Generation, published by Princeton University Press.

Charles Gati, Senior Adjunct Professor in Russian 
and Eurasian Studies, and Fellow at the Foreign 
Policy Institute, at the The Paul H. Nitze School 
of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins 
University, receives the Marshall Shulman Book 
Prize for an outstanding monograph dealing with 
the international relations, foreign policy, or 
foreign-policy decision-making of any of the 
states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern 
Europe for Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, 
Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, 
co-published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press and 
Stanford University Press in the Cold War International History Project Series.

János Kornai, Allie S. Freed Professor of 
Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and 
Permanent Fellow Emeritus at Collegium Budapest, 
receives the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for an 
outstanding publication on the political economy 
of the centrally planned economies of the former 
Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their 
transitional successors, for By Force of Thought: 
Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey, published by the MIT Press.

Pieter M. Judson, Professor of History at 
Swarthmore College, and Editor of the Austrian 
History Yearbook, a journal for the History of 
the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, 
receives the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize for a 
distinguished monograph on any aspect of 
Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 
1600, or nineteenth- and twentieth-century 
Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history, for 
Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the 
Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, published by Harvard University Press.

Two scholars share the AAASS/Orbis Books Prize 
for Polish studies for the best book in any 
discipline on any aspect of Polish affairs this year:

Marci Shore, Assistant Professor of History at 
Yale University, receives the prize for Caviar 
and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death 
in Marxism, 1918-1968, published by Yale University Press.

Genevieve Zubrzycki, Assistant Professor of 
Sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann 
Arbor, receives the prize for The Crosses of 
Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in 
Post-Communist Poland, published by the University of Chicago Press.

In addition, Emily Baran, PhD candidate in 
History at the University of North Carolina at 
Chapel Hill, receives the AAASS Graduate Student 
Essay Prize for an outstanding essay by a 
graduate student in Slavic studies for “Communism 
or Armageddon?: Representation of the Jehovah’s 
Witnesses in the Soviet Press, 1954-1985” which 
also won the Southern Conference on Slavic 
Studies graduate student essay competition.

# # #

For additional information about the AAASS, the 
awards presentation, an electronic version of 
this press release, full text of the citations 
for the awards, and contact information for prize 
winners or publishers, please contact: Dmitry 
Gorenburg, Executive Director of AAASS, tel.: 
617-496-9412, e-mail: gorenbur at fas.harvard.edu, 
or visit: www.aaass.org, and click on "AAASS Prizes."



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