Postgraduate prize winners for the year 2021 announced - George Bodie and Tamar Koplatadze
BASEES is delighted to share details of the postgraduate prizes for 2021. Thank you to our judges Kelly Hignett and Andrea Gullotta for their comments and judgements. Please see below details of our winners. Kelly and Andrea suggested that the field this year was of outstandingly high quality and many excellent articles were submitted, so winners and commendations are worthy of special praise. All in all, four people have had their very significant research honoured and praised. George Bodie and Tamar Koplatadze have been announced as joint winners, and articles by Mollie Arbuthnot and Jelena Golubović have been recognised as very worthy of commendation.
BASEES POSTGRADUATE PRIZE: JOINT WINNERS
George Bodie, ‘‘It is a Shame we are Not Neighbours’: GDR Tourist Cruises to Cuba, 1961–89’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 55/no. 2, (2020), pp. 411-434.
George Bodie’s article constitutes the first dedicated study of East German tourism to Cuba, a travel destination which functioned as both a site of exoticism and of revolutionary allure for the GDR. Extensively researched, using a rich combination of source materials including archival documents, state-produced travel material and secret police files, this fascinating study explores the ways in which GDR tourist cruises to Cuba fulfilled a variety of functions in the years 1961-1989, from their origins representing a utopian ideal of transnational proletarian convergence within the socialist world in the 1960s to the less imaginative reality of meeting growing domestic demand for ‘exotic’ travel in the 1980s, subject to increased security scrutiny. Bodie effectively argues that while the numbers of GDR citizens who partook in these cruises was relatively small, they provide an important example of how East Germans experienced the world outside of their nation’s borders, both in reality and in image. His research also critiques contemporary depictions of GDR travel and challenges the dominant presentation of the GDR in both academic and popular literature as parochial, insular, and restrictive. This article makes an important contribution to the growing field of socialist tourism and to changing perceptions of the Cold War-era ’socialist world system’ more generally.
Tamar Koplatadze ‘Theorising Russian Postcolonial Studies’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 22/no. 4, (2019), pp. 469-489.
In this rigorous and well-researched article, Tamar Koplatadze questions the legitimacy of the current application of postcolonial theory in Russian studies. In order to do so, the author analyses an impressive number of secondary sources, ranging from Gayatri Spivak and Adeeb Khalid’s invitation to widen the horizon of postcolonial studies in the post-Soviet area, to Mark von Hagen’s proposal to overcome the binary paradigms used to analyse Russia’s relationship with the East in relation to the concept of Eurasia, to the works of literary scholars, such as Harsha Ram. Koplatadze discusses with rigour an outstanding variety of approaches, ideas and interpretations on some of the key issues in Russian intellectual history, culture and geopolitics (e.g. Orientalism, modernisation and centre-periphery dynamics), providing a series of insights and thought-provoking analyses, and arguing in a convincing way that a new, more nuanced and less Russo-centric approach needs to be undertaken in order to obtain a more efficient and comprehensive implementation of postcolonial theory in Russian culture. By doing so, Koplatadze shows the ability to shift well-established paradigms, and she does so with a confidence that is surprising for a PG candidate.
Highly Commended:
In recognition of the very high standard of nominations for the BASEES Postgraduate prize this year, the judges would also like to formally make honourable mention of two other nominated articles:
Mollie Arbuthnot, ‘The People and the Poster: Theorizing the Soviet Viewer, 1920–1931’, Slavic Review, vol. 78/no. 3, (2019), pp. 717-737.
Jelena Golubović, ‘“One Day I Will Tell this to My Daughter”: Serb Women, Silence, and the Politics of Victimhood in Sarajevo’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 92/no. 4, (2019), pp. 1173-1199.