Past Winners of the Graduate Student Essay Prize
2023 - Clayton Marr, The Ohio State University, “The Angevin-Albanian Element in the Albanian Lexicon”
2022 - Zora Piskačová, UNC Chapel Hill, "A 'Common Enterprise'? The Role of Utility Infrastructures in the Divided City of Teschen, 1920-1938" and Eoin Lazaridis Power, University of Texas at Austin, "A Balkan Neofunctional Success Story, or the Curious Case of the CBBH"
2021 - Moira O’Shea, University of Chicago, “‘We Took the National Game and Turned It into a Sport:’ Playing Kok Boru and Re-Inventing Tradition in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan”
2020 - Leah Valtin-Erwin, Indiana University, “A Bag for All Systems: Shopping Bags and Urban Grocery Shopping in Late Communist and Early Post-Communist Eastern Europe 1980- 2000”
2019 - Elly Brinkley, New York University, “‘I Protest Wherever I Can’: The Belarus Free Theatre and CrossBorder Arts Activism”
2018 - Szabolcs László, Indiana University-Bloomington, “‘Performing for the Capitalists’: Cold War Cultural Diplomacy Experienced by Hungarian and Romanian Writers at the Iowa International Writing Program”
2017 - Louis Porter, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “No ‘Neutral Men’: A Day in the Life of a Soviet International Civil Servant, 1956-1967"
2016 - Anca Mandru, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The ‘Socialist Intellectual Brotherhood’ and the Nationalist Challenge”
2015 - Adrianne Jacobs, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “An Edible Empire: Soviet National Cuisines between Tradition and Modernity, 1965-85”
2014 - Taylor Craig Zajicek, Univerity of Washington, "Modern Friendship: The 'New Turkey' and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, 1933-1934"
2013 - Yulia Mikhailova, University of New Mexico, “'Christians and Pagans' in the Chronicles of Pre-Mongolian Rus: Beyond the Dichotomy of 'Good Us' and "Bad Them'”
2012 - Bathsheba Demuth, University of California, Berkeley, “More Things on Heaven and Earth: Modernism and Reindeer in the Bering Straits”
2011 - Jolanta Mickute, Indiana U, "Making of the Zionist Woman: Zionist Discourse on the Jewish Woman's Body and Sexuality"
2010 - Zsolt Nagy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "National Identities for Export: Hungarian, Czechoslovak, Romanian Nationality Rooms in Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning"
2009 - Ula Łukszo, Stony Brook University, “Bringing a Suppressed World to Light: Alterations to the Postcolonial Travel Narrative in Mariusz Wilk’s Wołoka”, winner of the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference competition.
2008 - Colleen M. Moore, Indiana University, “The Popular Response to War and Mobilization in Russia in 1914,” winner of First Prize in the Graduate Paper Daniel Armstrong Memorial Essay Contest at Indiana University.
2007 - Emily Baran, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Communism or Armageddon? Representations of the Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Press, 1954-1985"
2006 - Diana Mincyte, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, "The Pasteurization of Lithuania: Informal Food Markets and Globalization," winner of the graduate student essay competition held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
2005 - Nicholas Ganson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Exploring the Causes of Child Mortality during the Soviet Famine of 1946-1947”
2004 - Simon Rabinovitch, Brandeis University, “Positivism, Populism, and Politics: The Intellectual Foundations of JEwish Ethnography in Late Imperial Russia"
2003 - Kristin Roth-Ey, Princeton University, “The Problem with the ‘Youth Problem’: Bad Kids and the Soviet Community in the 1950s and 1960s”
2002 - None
2001 - Stephen M. Norris, University of Virginia, “Images of 1812: The Patriotic War in Russian Culture”
2000 - Toma Tasovac, Princeton University, “Tsvetaeva’s Space(s) of Non-Encounter”
1999 - Jeffrey Jones, University of North Carolina, “People Without a Definite Occupation: The Illegal Economy and ‘Speculators’ in Rostov on the Don, 1943-1948”
1998 - David Doellinger, University of Pittsburgh, “Emergence of Civil Society in Slovakia: The Role of the Secret Church”
1997 - Susanna Lockwood Smith, U of Minnesota “State Patronage and ‘People’s Music’”
1996 - Susanna Bolle, Brown University “Entertainment and Profit: The Demise of the Urban Festival in St. Petersburg”
1995 - Ernest Zitser, Columbia University, “Carnival and Coercion: the ‘All-Foools and All-Drunkards Synod’ and the Prehistory of the Petrine Cultural Refroms”
1994 - Anna Wertz, Brown University, “The Perspicuous Mirror: Feodor Sologub’s The Petty Demon and the Crisis of Identity and Authority in Turn-of-the-Century Russia”
1993 - Christopher Ely, Brown University, “Russia is a Country of Landscape: Nation and Nature in the Landscapes of Ivan Shishkin”
1992 - Adrian Wanner, Columbia University, "The Russian Battle over Baudelaire: Populists vs Democrats."
1991 - None
1990 - Kurt Treptow, University of Illinois
- Jeane Farneth Boone, Georgetown University