Women’s Forum Prizes
Please note that nominations for the BASEES Women’s Forum prizes are now closed. Nominations for the 2025 round (books and articles published in 2023 and postgraduate papers to be presented at the 2025 conference) will open later in the spring, when more information will be available below.
2024 WINNERS
2022 BOOK PRIZE, AWARDED 2024
Judges: Dr Rachel Morley (UCL SSEES) and Dr Elizabeth White (University of the West of England)
Winner: Neringa Klumbytė, Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022)
Neringa Klumbytė’s absorbing monograph is a refreshing, truly engaging and sophisticated account of the attempted imposition of the Soviet state project of authorised satire and humour in Lithuania from 1956 to 1985, as well as of resistance and accommodation to this project. Grounded in extensive original archival work, it is both a fascinating micro-history of the official satirical magazine Broom and a macro-history of political authoritarianism and the commonplace experiences of power that took place within it. The author deftly weaves in history, anthropology, ethnography, cultural criticism and political science to create a nuanced and unforgettable portrait of Lithuanian society in the late Soviet period, while also offering a compelling account of the research journey she undertook to create this book.
Honourable mention: Ana Grgić, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022)
This impressive monograph makes a major contribution to the emerging field of early Balkan cinema history as well as to early cinema studies more broadly, providing a fascinating account of how moving images were both made and consumed in the Balkans. Adopting a transnational and cross-cultural approach and drawing on materials from archives in thirteen countries (Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Greece, Hungary, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Romania, and the United Kingdom), the author challenges the traditional approach of early cinema studies, which often focuses on the ‘national’, and instead shows how the multiculturality of the Balkan space influenced visual culture and cinema between the 1890s and the mid-1910s.
2022 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE, AWARDED 2024
Judges: Dr Katy Turton (University of the Highlands and Islands) and Dr Tamar Koplatadze (University of Oxford)
Winner: Verita Sriratana, ‘I Burn (Marx’s) Paris: “Capital” Cities, Alienation and Deconstruction in the Works of Bruno Jasieński’, in Temporalities of Modernism, ed. by Carmen Borbély, Erika Mihálycsa and Petronia Petrar, European Modernism Studies, 9 (Milan: Ledizioni, 2022), pp. 147–71.
This is an impressive article. Sweeping in scope and fascinating in topic, it sets its close analysis of Jasieński’s I Burn Paris in the turbulent context of interwar Europe and the various intellectual, cultural and political movements of that time. The exploration of I Burn Paris as a response to and critique of Marx’s romanticisation of the Paris Commune is deftly handled and the article brings home bleakly the perils of being a writer who supported, but also critiqued, socialism.
Honourable mention: Julia Mannherz, ‘Piano Music, Fantasy, and Elizaveta Ivanova’s Ambivalent Feminism’, Women’s History Review, 31.3 (2022), pp. 408–28.
This well-researched article engagingly reconstructs the story of a little-known figure in late Imperial Russian history, Elizaveta Ivanova, and convincingly prompts us to rethink how we interpret women’s feminism, as well as musical pieces, thus simultaneously contributing to the fields of Russian studies, women’s history and musicology.
2024 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2024 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Winner: Ola Sidorkiewicz (University of Oxford) for her paper ‘Anthropology of Otherness, Anthropology of Polishness: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz in the Tropics’.
Sidorkiewicz's is an engaging and insightful paper, based on a deep reading of key literary sources, which offers a distinctive perspective on the place of Poland within the dominant colonial paradigms of early twentieth-century Europe. The committee members concluded that the topic and its treatment promised a lively and thought-provoking presentation at the 2024 BASEES conference.
Honourable mention: Natasha Vinnikova (University of the Arts, London) for her paper 'The Fabric of Society: Women in Thawing Cinema'.
WOMEN’S FORUM PRIZES – PAST WINNERS
2023
2023 BOOK PRIZE (2021 IMPRINT)
Judges: Dr Rachel Morley (UCL SSEES) and Dr Elizabeth White [University of the West of England)
Winner: Siobhán Hearne, Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021)
This meticulously researched, highly engaging and eminently readable book provides an original examination of the regulation of commercial sex in the final decades of the Russian Empire and of the experiences of those connected to it. In addition to offering a social history of prostitution, it is fascinating about the broader lived experience of lower-class women, not only as prostitutes or madams, but also as co-workers, mothers, friends, sisters, and possibly lovers. It tells us a great deal about lower-class urban life in general and the spaces it took place in, as well as offering insights into topics as varied as migration patterns, leisure, medicine and policing. The book takes an innovative approach to the question of the efficacy and reach of the Tsarist bureaucracy, without being a history of bureaucracy. A particular strength is its decentring of the Russian Empire. In addition to drawing on archives in the Imperial capitals, St Petersburg and Moscow, it includes archival material from the Arkhangelsk region, as well as from Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine. It contains stimulating reflections on the use of sources for lower-class urban life and the role of 'performance' in appeals to the Tsarist state. The judges agree that this wide-ranging book is a truly excellent scholarly achievement that could also be widely enjoyed by general readers.
Honourable mention: Suzanna Ivanič, Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague (Oxford University Press, 2021)
This absorbing book reveals how the spiritual world of the seventeenth-century inhabitants of Prague can be traced through an empathetic study of their material world. A range of material objects, including prayer beads, rosaries, amulets, books, glasses, knives and spoons, are skilfully analysed to build a picture of an early modern cosmos, in which the divine presented itself in the natural world and social environment across confessional divisions between Catholic and Protestant. Beautifully written and carefully researched, Ivanič’s book shows how religion was experienced as 'part of the everyday' and also offers a new portrait of a much-described city.
2023 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2021 IMPRINT)
Judges: Dr Katy Turton (University of the Highlands and Islands) and Professor Mary Heimann (Cardiff University)
Winner: Elana Resnick, ‘The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the Racialized Anthropocene’ American Anthropologist, 123.2 (2021), 222-236
This article is a precise, fascinating and timely examination of the way in which the EU manages its waste and – more importantly – how it treats those who work in the waste-management sector. Based on months of fieldwork in Sofia, where the author joined a mainly female, Romani Bulgarian street-sweeping team, the article highlights the racialised nature of environmental policies and practices. This article stayed with both judges, transforming their perspective and understanding. It has that rare quality, in common with the best works of scholarship, of bringing to light an argument or aspect which was hiding in plain sight.
Honourable mention: Polly Jones, ‘The Thaw’s Provincial Margins: Place, Community and Canon in Pages from Tarusa’, Slavic Review, 80.4 (2021), 792-815
This is an elegantly written and deeply researched article which evokes an entire world. Highly polished, refined and assured, it captures in microcosm the struggle of writers against the heavy hand of Soviet literary policy and the regime itself.
2023 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2023 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Winner: Serian Carlyle, ‘The Soviet Racial/Racist Utopia: Sex Among Students in Vladimir Rogovoi’s Balamut (The Meddler, 1979)’
Carlyle’s paper is very well-written and persuasive, with a clear structure and argument. It uses a single well-chosen primary source (Balamut, 1979, dir. by Vladimir Rogovoi) as an effective means of unpicking a wider and very topical issue (the ideals v. reality of Soviet attitudes towards race). Throughout, the analysis is well supported by theory. The judges all felt that this was a worthy winner and would make a very engaging conference paper that would be provide much of interest for specialists and non-specialists alike.
2022
2022 BOOK PRIZE (2020 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Simon Dixon and Professor Muireann Maguire
Winner: Rebecca Beasley, Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Rebecca Beasley’s Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism, 1881–1922 is a deftly written and magisterially informed history of cultural co-creation, transition, and counter-reaction in turn-of-the-century Britain. Tracing the cultural, personal, and ideological intertwining of pre-modernist thought with Russian influences through a multiplicity of individual encounters and artistic exchanges, this book follows literary and historical developments over four turbulent decades. Drawing upon extensive research in writers’ and artists’ personal archives, as well as on fiction and journalism of the period and on an impressive range of contemporary scholarly literature, Beasley maps the evolution of Britain’s overlapping yet divergent networks for the reception and dissemination of Russian culture. Her richly detailed, remarkably entertaining discussion of both major and minor characters active in this process – from members of the Bloomsbury Group to the emerging translators and academics trained at newly founded Russian departments in Oxford, Birmingham, Bristol and elsewhere – offers new perspectives on well-known historical figures (Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence) while re-introducing obscurer, but even more significant, agents of change, such as Sir Bernard Pares (founder of the United Kingdom’s first School of Russian Studies at the University of Liverpool), or the translators John Cournos and S.S. Kotelyansky. Beasley acutely situates the emergence of British modernism not only amongst enthusiasts for Russian literature, but also in the reaction against Russian influence (voiced by T.S. Eliot and Henry James, among others), in an era when British attitudes to Russian culture veered from fervency to fear. No future history of twentieth-century British literature or of Anglo-Russian cultural relations will be complete without reference to Russomania.
Honourable mention: Molly Pucci, Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (Yale University Press, 2020)
The judges also wish to highly commend Molly Pucci’s Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe as an outstanding history of how networks of influence and control evolve within repressive political systems, and as an exhaustively researched study of a vitally relevant topic. It will be invaluable to students and researchers as a case study of the mechanism of totalitarianism.
2022 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2020 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Katharine Hodgson and Dr Katy Turton
Winner: Julia Mannherz, ‘Performing Glinka’s Opera A Life for the Tsar on the Village Stage’, Slavic Review, 79.4 (2020), 755–77.
The case study at the core of this excellent article shows how Elizaveta Shniukova, a young peasant woman living in the Perm province, was able to access a musical education which enabled her, aged twenty-two, to direct amateur performances of Glinka’s patriotic opera in villages around her region. Mannherz uses the example of Shniukova’s career to reveal an unfamiliar and fascinating picture of cultural life in late Imperial Russia. She draws on archival materials and memoirs for an engaging account of a scheme designed to promote a conservative, patriotic outlook through choral singing which provided people from outside the cultural elite, including many women, with the training and mentoring they needed to become agents in promoting cultural activity in their rural communities. Mannherz explores the artistic collaboration between peasants, regional intelligentsia, workers, and state officials that empowered Shniukova to take the lead in encouraging people in the countryside to participate in musical education and performance, and to bring works from the operatic repertoire to a receptive rural audience. Indeed, the article offers a striking picture of the extent to which there were opportunities for women to pursue their ambitions and exercise agency in this period. Lastly, Mannherz’s article is a superb example of how a single case study of an individual’s provincial life can highlight the vibrant and important relationships between the centre and the periphery in studies of late Imperial Russia.
Honourable mention: Andrea Peinhopf, ‘The Curse of Displacement: Local Narratives of Forced Expulsion and the Appropriation of Abandoned Property in Abkhazia’, Nationalities Papers (2020), 1–18.
This account of the legacy of the conflict in Abkhazia, based on extensive fieldwork, looks at the ways that the forced expulsion of Georgians and the appropriation of their property are viewed by the ethnic Abkhazian population. In her finely nuanced analysis of informants’ accounts Peinhopf identifies four dominant narratives grounded in a sense of collective victimhood, as well as a challenge to such narratives in discourse about the appropriation of Georgian homes by Abkhaz people. This article makes a convincing case for the insights to be gained from lengthy participant observation, and for a detailed analysis of post-conflict narratives which can reveal suppressed feelings of discontent, unease and shame in the ‘victors’, a focus both for discontent and for a postwar identity based in shared experience.
2022 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2022 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Winner: Sarah Gear, ‘Translating Politics: Simplification vs. Obfuscation in Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of The Oprichnikand Zakhar Prilepin’s Sankya’
This paper demonstrated considerable original research on the translation journeys of the two headline works and a clear ability to explain the wider implications of its conclusions. The topic is fascinating and timely, and the committee concluded that it would make for a lively and engaging presentation at the BASEES Conference.
2021
2021 BOOK PRIZE (2019 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Simon Dixon and Dr Muireann Maguire
Winner: Ruth Coates, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (Oxford University Press, 2019)
While our understanding of the Russian religious renaissance has been vastly amplified over the last generation, unfamiliar vocabulary and still more unfamiliar modes of expression have conspired to keep even the most fundamental Orthodox ideas beyond the reach of all but a dedicated band of specialists. By exploring a variety of eschatological solutions to one of the most important questions that Christians face – how to transform death into everlasting life – Deification in Russian Religious Thought addresses a broader readership. As Ruth Coates shows with exemplary clarity and grace, apocalyptic challenges were especially acute in the revolutionary era between 1905 and 1917. Beginning with Merezhkovsky’s Tsar and Revolution (1907), 'the text that engages most overtly with Russia’s contemporary political realities', she goes on to consider works by Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov before discussing Florensky’s Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), 'the most recognizably Orthodox treatment' of her subject. Specialists will admire the precision and poise of the analysis. But this is a book whose importance extends to all those with an interest in modernism, Marxism and millenarianism. As a distinguished and discriminating study of the place of religious ideas in the culture of Russia’s Silver Age, it deserves the widest possible reception.
Honourable Mention: Polly Jones, Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography (Oxford University Press, 2019)
This authoritative book compels attention for three substantial achievements. It is a case study of an important phenomenon in the Soviet publishing industry (the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series of biographies introduced in 1968 to ‘rekindle’ post-Thaw readers’ socialist enthusiasm); a study of late Soviet reading habits; and an analysis of how Soviet publishing actually functioned. The tightly organized chapters are informed by numerous interviews with former industry insiders as well as impressively thorough archival research, making extensive use of committee minutes and other official documents to illuminate late-Soviet decision-making mechanisms. Polly Jones’ book upsets various ideological assumptions and reveals unexpected paradoxes: for example, the fact that this relatively experimental, at times daringly liberal book series was one of the first publishing initiatives to founder during the market transformation of the 1990s.
2021 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2019 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Katharine Hodgson
Winner: Jelena Golubović, ‘“One Day I Will Tell This to My Daughter”: Serb Women, Silence, and the Politics of Victimhood in Sarajevo.” Anthropological Quarterly 92.4 (2019), 1173-1199.
This excellent analysis is based on fieldwork in Sarajevo and reflects upon the results of interviews with Serb women who stayed in the city during the siege of 1992-1995. It sets out to explore the literature and realities of the moral economy of victimhood which can encourage recognition of certain victims but in so doing fails to recognise others. Golubovic convincingly challenges the dichotomy between victims and perpetrators and ways of interpreting the world in terms of ‘either/or’ It is an outstanding contribution to the literature for addressing layers of complexity in a lucid and persuasive way. The evidence gathered in fieldwork is well integrated into her argument and effectively demonstrates the tangled nature of the situation that she explores. The ethical dimension also merits recognition.
Honourable Mention: Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, ‘Systems Analysis as Infrastructural Knowledge: Scientific Expertise and Dissensus under State Socialism’, History of Political Economy, 51 (S1) (2019), 204-227.
This fascinating discussion of hugely wide scope highlights how important systems scientists in the USSR derived an authority and legitimacy from material successes in designing infrastructures. Information about them was often unexplored due to secrecy surrounding their work. Systems scholars, however, became vital mediators between computer technology and decision-making in infrastructural design. Scientists could resist projects and play a role in internal scientific dissent. Rindzevičiūtė’s examination of their role in Soviet aid programmes in Cuba and Vietnam leads the author to contend that systems analysts could, in fact, practise a politics of dissensus by disagreeing with the utility of large-scale projects and by favouring more pragmatic ‘modelable’ policies to fit local conditions.
2021 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2021 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
No award made. Conference postponed due to Covid-19.
2020
2020 BOOK PRIZE (2018 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Simon Dixon and Dr Muireann Maguire
Joint Winner: Natalia Nowakowska, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation Before Confessionalization (Oxford University Press, 2018).
As many of the myriad tomes published to mark the 500th anniversary of the German Reformation inadvertently proved, it is hard to say anything new about Lutheranism. Conscious of the weighty historiography on which she builds, Natalia Nowakowska nevertheless breaks fresh ground -- and not only with reference to Poland. Drawing on copious archival research and exemplifying the virtues of close linguistic analysis for the study of religious toleration, King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation before Confessionalization explores the plurality of sixteenth-century Christianity by reflecting on the tensions between rival aspirations to ecclesiastical consensus on the one hand and doctrinal purity on the other. The work of a sophisticated scholar at the height of her powers, this is the sort of elegant history-writing that merits the attention of readers far beyond the author’s specialist field.
Joint Winner: Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Crisp, lively and consistently engaging, Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie draws on the author’s unique access to some eighty contemporary Russian plutocrats. Deftly integrating their personal testimony with insights from the classic texts of sociology, Elisabeth Schimpfössl takes us deep into a mind-set hitherto obscured by rumour and myth. Under her microscope, Russia’s super-rich turn out to be an intriguingly complex group, diverse in their opinions, scarred by mutual distrust, and yet conscious of their emergent elite identity. Studded with provocative historical comparisons, and sensitive throughout to questions of gender, this fresh, brave first book deserves the widest possible readership.
Honourable Mention: Claire E. McCallum, The Fate of The New Man: Representing & Reconstructing Masculinity in Soviet Visual Culture, 1945-1965 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018)
Claire E. McCallum’s first monograph collates and interprets a wide range of Soviet representations of masculinity, making an important contribution to Slavic Gender Studies.
2020 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2018 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Katharine Hodgson
Joint Winner: Richard C.M. Mole, ‘Identity, Belonging and Solidarity among Russian-speaking Queer Migrants in Berlin,’ Slavic Review 77.1 (2018), 77–98.
Mole is especially rigorous in laying out his methodology and in defining key concepts. His analysis is based on qualitative data from twenty-one in-depth interviews with LGBT Russian speakers in Berlin to explore their motivations for migration and its impact on their lives and identity. Vivid quotations illustrate varied reflections and demonstrate that their sense of Russianness is often ‘just one of a “palette of identities.”’ An excellent and original contribution to the literature on migration which recognises the complexity of overlapping and multiple diasporic identities.
Joint Winner: Siobhán Hearne, ‘To Denounce or Defend? Public Participation in the Policing of Prostitution in Late Imperial Russia, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 19.4 (2018), 717–44.
This original article discusses denunciations and letters of defense found in the Central State Historical Archive in St Petersburg and in the Latvian State Historical Archive written at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Analysis explores the ‘elusive’ voices of registered prostitutes, their clients and urban dwellers and reflects upon what they reveal about attitudes towards sexuality and morality through their references to public health, morals, honour and right. This is a most engaging contribution which traces how ‘dutiful denouncers’ and ‘victims of injustice and discrimination’ draw on ‘dominant official and popular discourses.’
Honourable Mention: Louise Hardiman, ‘The “Martinoff Drawings”: a quest for Russian art at the South Kensington Museum’, The Burlington Magazine, 160, December 2018.
This article is the result of a fascinating and thorough investigation into art historical interest in Russia in the UK at the Victoria and Albert Museum in its early years when it was called the South Kensington Museum. Louise Hardiman explores the nature of links between the two countries that developed due to the wide aims of Henry Cole and due to the especially persistent initiatives of Cunliffe-Owen in pursuit of achieving his mission to acquire works of art from Russia. Nicely illustrated and a tale delightfully and carefully told.
2020 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2020 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
No award made. Conference postponed due to Covid-19.
2019
2019 BOOK PRIZE (2017 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Dan Healey and Professor Barbara Heldt
Winner: Claire Shaw, Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (Cornell University Press, 2017)
From the beginning of the Soviet era, the social power of the deaf, their agency and autonomy, was tied to sovietness. This statement, however, oversimplifies a complex history, which Claire Shaw explicates in remarkable detail, drawing on both published and archival sources. Her book expands the scope of our understanding of behaviours and identity in Soviet history, while also providing glimpses into the pre-revolutionary and post-Soviet eras. How deaf identity has been marked by separateness v. inclusion, the status of sign language, the dignity of work, criminality, gender and many other issues will make this landmark study a classic read.
Honourable Mention: Barbara Havelková, Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism (Bloomsbury, 2017)
2019 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2017 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Cathie Carmichael
Winner: Sarah Marks, ‘The Romani Minority, Coercive Sterilizations, and Languages of Denial in the Czech Lands’, History Workshop Journal, 84, Autumn 2017, 128-148
The article possesses several strengths: firstly, it draws on multiple sources which include oral history as well as published and unpublished materials; secondly, it offers a highly sophisticated and rich discussion of the complexities of whistleblowing, lack of action, denial, silences, state-fostered uniformedness and coercion concerning sterilization practices of the Romani minority; thirdly, and most ambitiously, it approaches data through the framework of Czech phenomenology, which itself drew on the tradition of European philosophy. The piece is very well-written, flows nicely and makes an important contribution to the study of politics and society in Soviet Czechoslovakia and in the Czech Republic, to gender studies and also to methodology.
Honourable Mention: Matilda Mroz, ‘Film at Full Gallop: Aesthetics and the Equine in Poland’s Epic Cinema’, in Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe: Film Cultures and Histories, ed. by Dorota Ostrowska, Francesco Pitassio, and Zsuzsanna Varga (I.B. Tauris, 2017), 173-183.
2019 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2019 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Winner: Sasha Rasmussen, ‘Sharovarnitsy – Women and Trousers in the late Russian Empire’
This paper demonstrated considerable original research on the reception of the jupe-culotte/iubka-pantalony in turn of the century France and Russia, and an engagement with theories of sensory history that underpinned a persuasive comparative case study. The judges all agreed that that this paper would make an engaging presentation at the BASEES Conference.
2018
2018 BOOK PRIZE (2016 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Dan Healey and Professor Barbara Heldt
Joint Winner: Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin(Yale University Press, 2016)
Pauline Fairclough’s Classics for the Masses shows how, in the shaping of Soviet cultural identity from 1917 to 1953, music played an important role. Great works of art were integrated into the Soviet canon, but could also be used to criticise contemporary Soviet artists, to build a new narrative of Russian supremacy, while stamping out musical avant-gardism. Fairclough’s book provides fascinating detail on programming and performance based on archival research. She explains judiciously an era which, while it may not have ‘moulded’ the Soviet listener, did offer a form of entertainment not widely accessible before 1917. The canon was never wholly static, even in the years 1948-53, when it was most tightly controlled. Her book will be the definitive work on this subject.
Joint Winner: Sarah Badcock, A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism (Oxford University Press, 2016)
While Soviet historiography emphasized the cultural benefits that political exiles brought to Siberia, Sarah Badcock’s A Prison Without Walls? gives voice as well to the regional authorities and local populations, who articulated the negative impacts of exile on their communities. Exiles who lacked private means were forced to provide for themselves in unaccustomed conditions. There was a quota on those allowed into the towns, and little work elsewhere. Criminal exiles roamed free, for example in Yakut villages, further impoverishing and terrorising their local inhabitants. Badcock has consulted archives in the Sakha Republic and the Irkutsk Oblast. We hear new kinds of voices in this study, and find descriptions that prove further that state ambitions for forced labour and the misery of prisoners and their families did not begin with the Soviet state.
2018 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2016 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Cathie Carmichael
Joint Winner: Agnes Kriza, ‘The Russian Knadenstuhl’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 79 (2016), pp. 79-130.
Joint Winner: Michelle Assay, 'What did Hamlet (not) do to offend Stalin?' Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [on line], 35 / 2017.
This year saw a great range of essays submitted which demonstrated that scholarship by women on Eastern Europe is really flourishing. We awarded the BASEES women's prize jointly to Agnes Kriza for her beautifully illustrated article on ‘The Russian Knadenstuhl’ for the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. The intricacy of the research impressed the judges as well as her empirical range which integrated material from a several historiographical traditions. We thought it was a striking piece of historical detection, which rescued a little-known period in Russian history. The other joint winner was Michelle Assay for her original and incisive article 'What did Hamlet (not) do to offend Stalin?' Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare. Dr Assay elegantly traced Stalin’s antipathy to ‘Hamletism’ and historic Russian interpretations of Hamlet rather than to Shakespeare and the Danish prince per se. Drawing on a wide range of secondary and archival sources, the article presented a nuanced, compelling and tight argument.
2018 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2018 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Joint Winner: Sarah Dorr, ‘The elite-level demonstration effect of the Arab Spring in Kazakhstan: 2005-2015’
Joint Winner: Lara Green, ‘Feliks Volkhovskii, Transnational Networks, and Terrorist Propaganda, 1890-1914’
2017
2017 BOOK PRIZE (2015 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Dan Healey and Professor Barbara Heldt
Winner: Lenka Krátká, A History of the Czechoslovak Ocean Shipping Company, 1948-1989: How a Small, Landlocked Country Ran Maritime Business during the Cold War (ibidem, 2015)
A fascinating and definitive account of its subject, showing why and how a landlocked country ran a shipping business. Krátká’s impeccable methodology combines archival work, oral history, and an account of the political background of the era 1948-1989. Her analysis of the personal lives of the shipboard staff reveals dimensions of Central European masculinity in a global setting. The final chapter detailing the ‘memoirs’ of each of the ships from its naming to its ‘passing on’ brings each one to life with its team of seafarers who worked in an atmosphere semi-detached from the troubles of the world. This is an important contribution to transnational histories of really existing socialism, from an imaginative and enterprising scholar.
2017 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2015 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Cathie Carmichael
Winner: Victoria Ivleva, 'Catherine II as Female Ruler: The Power of Enlightened Womanhood.' Vivliofika: e-journal of eighteenth-century Russian studies, 3, pp. 20-46.
The judges were unanimous in their conclusion that Victoria Ivleva’s ‘Catherine II as Female Ruler: the Power of Enlightened Womanhood,’ was a clear winner and a delight to read. The essay is a well-argued and original contribution to the literature on Catherine. The author engages with a wide range of texts and explains her argument in a way which is scholarly, interdisciplinary and accessible. The article adeptly engages the reader in a flowing discussion of various strategies that Catherine used to legitimize her authority as a female ruler. Ivleva expertly focuses on Tsarina's letters as well as portraits and clothes to make a convincing case that Catherine capitalised on both masculine and feminine roles and behaviours by highlighting androgynous qualities. She crafted a public image of herself as a woman of merit, a matriarch, craftswoman, house manager and educator and conveyed the notion that an advantage of womanhood was its virtue of housecraft, itself analogous to statecraft.
Honourable Mention: Sarah Hudspith, ‘Traversing the labyrinth: female protagonists’ experience of Moscow in fiction of the 1990s’, Modern Language Review, 110 (3), 2015: 759-80.
2017 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2017 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Winner: Siobhan Hearne, ‘The Malevolent Madam: Brothel Keepers in Late Imperial Russia’
2016
2016 BOOK PRIZE (2014 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Dan Healey and Professor Barbara Heldt)
Winner: Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová. The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice (Routledge, 2014)
Havelkova & Oates-Indruchova’s book is rigorous exploration of society under socialism 1948-1989 and its impact on gender. It is a collective work that places high-quality, internationalized Czech scholarship into the English-language domain. One of its particular strengths is its development of gender theory in relation to the ideology of state socialism. The volume is interdisciplinary, including historical, sociological and cultural essays which have been melded into a coherent whole. The book makes an important contribution to understanding the theory and practice of the representation, practice and performance of gender in post-war East Central Europe.
2016 ARTICLE/CHAPTER PRIZE (2014 IMPRINT)
Judges: Professor Mary Buckley and Professor Cathie Carmichael
Joint Winner: Melanie Ilic, ‘Women and Competition in State Socialist Societies: Soviet-era Beauty Contests’, in Competition in Socialist Society, ed. by Katalin Miklóssy and Melanie Ilic (Routledge, 2014), 159-175.
Melanie Ilic’s chapter contributes to the literature on the significance of Soviet beauty contests, building on the past research of Elizabeth Waters, Lena Moskalenko and others. Using a range of primary and secondary sources, Ilic adds fills gaps in knowledge with new details and forwards the argument that such competitions highlighted the internal fragility of the dominance of Russian-defined Soviet cultural norms. She holds that initially there was an attempt to adapt the Western format by drawing on Soviet traditions but in the final years of the USSR the beauty contest illustrated a ‘significant shift in the ideals of female form and appearance towards a more uniform Westernised standard.’ This piece constitutes a careful analysis across competitions from Miss Russia pageants for emigrees in Paris in the late 1920s to ‘Moscow Beauty’ and ‘Miss USSR’ competitions in the late 1980s up to 1991, as well as regional competitions (such as Miss Irkutsk) and those held in other republics (notably, Princess of the Tadjik New Year).
Joint Winner: Jan Plamper, ‘Ivan’s Bravery’, in Learning How to Feel: Children's Literature and the History of Emotional Socialization 1870-1970, by Ute Frevert and others, (Oxford University Press, 2014), 191-208.
Jan Plamper’s chapter examines the depiction of boys in Russian children’s literature and teaching manuals and explores the messages that they convey. In a lively and engaging discussion he asks how the novella might function in the ‘process of emotional learning’ and in this case in the production of future brave soldiers. Across sources he finds that bravery is the most prevalent emotion and fear is ‘conspicuously absent from the spectrum of feeling.’ A regular strand is that readers are expected to emulate a hero who is resourceful and brave, indeed inherently courageous. Plamper contends that bravery is, in fact, conveyed as ‘a state of being.’ Plamper makes a sound and convincing case across the stories that he cites for boys and cadets. This is a very strong contribution to understanding how ideal gender expectations are relayed to children.
2016 POSTGRADUATE PAPER PRIZE (paper presented at 2016 conference)
Judged by the Women’s Forum Committee
Joint Winner: Ellen Martus, ‘Interest representation in Russian environmental policy-making: the case of oil and gas’
Joint Winner: Cathy McAteer, ‘Reds under beds: The Story of a Russian Agent and his Strange collection of Penguins’