Cristina Vatulescu, awarded the George Blazyca Prize

Cristina Vatulescu, “Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges” (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2024) has been selected as the winner of this year’s George Blazyca Prize in Eastern European Studies:

Cristina Vatulescu’s Reading the Archival Revolution brings remarkable material to light through meticulous archival work and offers a striking window into surveillance and its narrative afterlives. Vatulescu shows how declassified files do not simply reveal truth but produce complex, often unsettling stories. Among the most bewilderingly delicious moments is the suggestion that Michel Foucault may have authored self-incriminating denunciations (informant reports) preserved in the archives of the Polish Security Services - an archival twist that encapsulates the book’s provocations.

Claire Morelon, “Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024) has been commended with an honourable mention:

Claire Morelon guides the reader through the dimly lit streets and tightly packed squares of a city in turmoil. Her book is the remarkable culmination of deep archival study and meticulous scholarship in multiple countries. Rich textual sources, evocative photographs, and illustrative vignettes serve to recreate wartime Prague, its diverse inhabitants, and the upheavals, continuities, and changes that shaped their destiny. The result is a unique, visceral, street-level vantage point on a Habsburg Empire in its death throes and the contested birth of the Czechoslovak Republic.