The Mary Zirin Prize for Outstanding Scholarship

Elena Ivanovna Trofimova

In a field of very strong candidates her application stood out. She has persevered under difficult conditions in making visible the work of women writers. Beginning in the 1980s she sponsored women's literary evenings in Moscow. Since 1991 Trofimova has taken a leading role in the work of the women's club Preobrazhenie and soon after became part of the editorial collective of the feminist almanac Preobrazhenie. In 1997 she became the chief editor of the almanac. Her list of talks and publications is extensive and impressive, including a number of entries in the Dictionary of Russian Women Writers and 500 Russian Writers of the Twentieth Century as well as many articles on women's literature, feminism and the work of individual Russian women writers. Among her many projects is a joint endeavor with Freiburg University in Germany to create a library of Russian women's literature. We commend Elena Ivanovna's extensive record of accomplishments in women's literature, feminism and history in awarding her the Zirin Prize.

Kazimiera Janina Cottam

We honor Jean Cottam's long record of scholarship in the field of women's history, especially women's military history. We were impressed by the scope of Jean's work and by the fact that she published not only her own research but also the writings of other women whose work would otherwise have been unknown.

Jean Cottam has faced discrimination in receiving academic awards and in obtaining an academic position. Nevertheless she has played a pioneering role in the field of Soviet/Russian women's military history, self published four books on women in the airwar on the eastern front, as well as memoirs of women soldiers and partisans. She has contributed entries to the Biographical Dictionary of Military Women Worldwide, and published many articles about women in the military. We commend Jean Cottam's contribution as an independent scholar to the field of Russian/Soviet women's history in awarding her the Zirin Prize.

Best Book in Slavic Women's Studies

Christine D. Tomei, ed. Russian Women Writers (Garland, 1999).

Russian Women Writers is a major achievement. This two-volume study includes biographical information and translations of works by seventy-one Russian women writers beginning with Catherine the Great to the present day. Over seventy scholars contributed to the information found in these pages, making this work a truly collaborative effort. Christine Tomei and her contributors are to be congratulated for all their efforts. This work should stand as a valuable reference for anyone interested in Russian literary life and the history of Russian women.

Best Book by a Woman in Slavic Studies

Katherine Verdery. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-socialist Change (Columbia University Press, 1999).

Katherine Verdery has written an imaginative and engaging book on the afterlife of dead bodies in postsocialist Europe. Through her careful analysis of just a few of the reburials which have taken place since the collapse of communism, we can clearly see how "dead bodies animate the study of politics." Gracefully combining anthropology and political theory, Verdery argues for a new understanding of political life, one that takes into account symbolism, life experiences, and morality. This "enchanted" view of politics provides a much richer and deeper understanding of cultural complexity.

Best Article in Slavic Women's Studies

Padraic Kenney, "The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland," American Historical Review, (April 1999): 399-425.

Padraic Kenney has written a pathbreaking article on the role of gender under communism. While he acknowledges that the dramatic confrontation between the state and male workers in socialist Poland were important, Kenney explores the ways in which a materialist consumer discourse articulated by women workers undermined the communist regime and ultimately led to the fall of the regime. Kenney argues quite persuasively for the central role of gender in shaping communist Eastern Europe. This article serves as a model for how the study of gender can enrich our understanding of history.

Best Translation in Slavic Women's Studies

Celia Hawkesworth, trans., The Culture of Lies, authored by Dubravka Ugresic (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

Celia Hawkesworth has produced a translation of great power and beauty. The Culture of Lies written by Dubravka Ugresic, a modern-day Croatian Cassandra, chronicles the destruction of the Yugoslav cultural milieu and the creation of a modern Croatian literary culture. Hawkesworth manages to take these subtle, highly sophisticated essays and make them at once natural sounding, impressively rich and intellectual, and fundamentally foreign. This is an important, timely, and moving book, and a superb translation.

Graduate Essay Prize

Dr. Heather Coleman (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

The Graduate Essay Prize has been awarded to Dr. Heather Coleman for chapter two of her dissertation, "The Most Dangerous Sect: Baptists in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, 1905-1929," which was defended in July 1998 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Coleman's prize-winning essay, "Becoming a Russian Baptist: Conversion Narratives and Personal Experience," is a well-written and perceptive analysis of individuals who became Baptists at the turn of the century through the early 1920s. Shtundism has been ignored by historians, although it is continually referred to in revolutionary writings, religious journals, and studies of nationality movements.

Coleman is the first to take the issue had on and explore the reasons why Shtundism was "the fastest growing non-Orthodox religious movement among Russians in the early twentieth century." Using archival resources and periodical literature, she moves from a case study of a conversion experience to a broader base of converts to Baptism and reconstructs the religious encounters of religious migrants to the cities. Converts to Baptism did not become revolutionaries, but Coleman shows us that their conversion experience was as transformative as the changes in identity that new revolutionaries have described. The Baptists' faith "was a deeply personal choice, helping them navigate the problems of dissent, of order and disorder, of modernization and westernization, and of national and social identity in their changing society."

Currently Dr. Coleman holds the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary.