The Stephen White Prize for the Best First Book in Slavonic and East European Studies
The Stephen White Prize was established by BASEES in March 2024 in recognition of the outstanding contribution to its field of study made by the late Professor Stephen White. The prize is offered annually by BASEES for an author's first published monograph of exceptional merit and lasting significance for Slavonic and East European Studies broadly defined. Items eligible for nomination are singly or jointly authored monographs. The authors of nominated works must at the time of nomination be members or associate members of the Association.
For the 2024-25 cycle, the White Prize scheme is accepting nominations for books published in 2024. The deadline for nominations is 30 June 2025. The winners will be announced early in 2026 and the prize (if awarded) will be presented at the annual dinner of the 2026 BASEES conference.
The works received will be scored by our judges against criteria of originality, rigour and significance. Works nominated for consideration must be of a scholarly character and must be in English. Winners will be works that make a major contribution to Slavonic and East European studies. For 2024-25, our judges are Dr Catherine Baker, Dr Rajendra Chitnis, and Dr Egle Rindzeviciute.
The current regulations are as follows:
1. The prize, of one hundred fifty pounds, plus a ticket to the yearly conference dinner, is offered annually for the best first book in Slavonic and East European Studies.
2. A nomination may take the form of a monograph, usually authored by either one or two authors. Edited collections of essays are not eligible for the scheme.
3. The deadline for submission of nominations shall be 30 June each year in respect of publications whose imprint date is the previous calendar year. The prize is awarded (if a recommendation is made to do so) at the Association's annual conference in the spring of the calendar year following the deadline for submission of nominations.
4. The authors of nominated works must at the time of nomination be members or associate members of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. It is the responsibility of the nominator to check the BASEES membership status of potential nominees and ensure that membership is in place prior to nomination. Nominations of non-members will not be considered.
5. Awards will be made by a jury whose membership will be approved by the Executive Committee of the Association. This will normally consist of a former President of the Association and another judge, both of whom are selected to represent the diversity, breadth and scholarly excellence of the discipline and our organization.
6. The jury will usually award the Prize to one nominated work in any year, but judges can also make honourable mentions.
7. Works may be nominated for consideration by the authors, or by publishers, librarians or other scholars.
8. Nominations should be made on the standard form for this purpose, which is available as a download from this page, and submitted to the Secretary of the Association, or via electronic submission below.
9. Please send copies of the nominated book to all members of this year’s Book Prize committee listed below. Ideally, books will be received before nominations close. Submissions will normally be accepted in hard copy (preferred) or electronic copy (if no hard copy is available). We encourage submissions of an electronic copy plus a hard copy. Hard copies should be sent to:
Dr Catherine Baker
History/Humanities
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
Hull, HU6 7RX.
Dr Rajendra Chitnis
Associate Professor of Czech
F.3, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
47 Wellington Square
Oxford OX1 2ER
Dr Egle Rindzeviciute
FBSS
Kingston University London
Penrhyn Road
Kingston upon Thames
KT6 4EY
10. Work may be submitted both for the Stephen White Prize, Alexander Nove Prize, George Blazyca Prize and the BASEES Women’s Forum prizes, where relevant. More detail on the conditions of the Women’s Forum prizes can be found here.
Current winner
Winner: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky. “Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Within a rich and diverse field of submissions, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State stood out among all other contenders for the extensiveness of its archival research, the breadth of languages at its author’s command, and the exceptional ambition of its transnational and transimperial approach, analysing not only the politics of ethnic categorisation and population management in the Russian and Ottoman Empires’ shaping of the North Caucasus but also articulating the subjectivities of the displaced through rich cultural materials, stories and examples. Its evidence that the Ottoman Empire established a nonwestern, non-secular refugee management regime in response to Muslims fleeing Russian colonisation of the North Caucasus, predating the resettlement models of twentieth-century international institutions, and its ability to see this case within the global history of indigenous displacement during the ‘first wave’ of globalisation, would itself be a major contribution to the history of modern humanitarianism, and would supply a missing piece of the puzzle for understanding later modernisation in this area where peoples were transformed from imperial subjects into nation-state citizens. But more than that, this impressively crafted transnational history of population displacement succeeds in bringing this history of Russian colonisation of the Caucasus into unprecedented dialogue with the dislocations of the late nineteenth-century Balkans, adding new contours to our understandings of ethnonationalism and violence in the turbulent 1870s. Equally organically, it then connects both regions into the histories of Anatolia and the Levant – spaces which have conventionally been left outside the purview of Slavonic and East European studies yet demand to be brought under the same lens in order to understand how we arrived at today’s world. The depth with which it fulfils the immense task of tracing its communities through so many archives, countries and literatures, and the reframing it calls for as a result, makes Empire of Refugees a thoroughly deserving winner of the second Stephen White Prize.
Honourable Mention:
Claire Morelon, “Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920” (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Claire Morelon’s immensely readable, intellectually creative, ambitious and original study of the transition of Prague from Habsburg ‘third city’ to Czechoslovak capital, Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920, powerfully brings to life for readers the multi-sensory experience of what it was like for Prague’s inhabitants, examining major political and social processes through a city as a political and social world and a material assembly where notions of nationalism, patriotism and empire are forged and articulated. As well as its profound revision and enrichment of established understandings of the history of Prague in this period, in ‘penetrating the night of war’, the book constitutes a model that may not only be emulated for comparable historical urban contexts, but also speak to today’s experience of residents of cities entangled in ongoing wars, directly and remotely. The judges especially appreciated the way the author had transformed a large and complex range of primary, archival material and rigorous engagement with an imposing body of existing literature into a lively, moving and absorbing narrative that in many years could have been a worthy winner of this prize.
Past winners
Katarzyna Nowak, "Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria" (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023).
The judges were unanimous in awarding the prize to this meticulously researched and composed archive-based study of identity formation among displaced Poles at the end of World War II. We admired the exceptional range and variety of sources used, the care with which subjects were handled and the rare sensitivity shown to features like social class. This book will be a key reference for scholars working on displaced people for both its content and methodology, and for anyone seeking to understand better the specific complexity of Polish identity formation in the twentieth century.
Honourable Mention:
Lyubomir Pozharliev, ""The Road to Socialism": Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945-1989). (Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH, 2023),
Lyubomir Pozharliev places a refreshing focus on the making of East Central Europe through the politics of infrastructure, namely, the building of roads in socialist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Besides what can be learned from comparing these two neighbouring countries and their distinct national contexts, The Road to Socialism impressively combines attention to both the utilitarian role of infrastructures and their symbolic role. Through exhaustive knowledge of both countries’ road-building projects, the book exposes how socialist practice failed to live up to its promises and how road networks supposed to unify a new socialist nation could instead keep communities apart.