Volume 7, Issue 1
June 2018
In This Issue
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Natalia Pushkareva: Remarks at the AWSS Reception, November 2017
 
It is a great honor and privilege for me to be the recipient of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies Outstanding Achievement Award for 2017, so I thank the Association and all of you, my friends and colleagues. I'm grateful and proud to receive this recognition of my efforts in promoting Russian women's history.
 
It is flattering that my efforts were noticed and appreciated by colleagues in the United States, the country that first (long before the other countries including my own country, Russia) noticed my research in this field in the distant 1980s. So many years ago my topic was not considered scientific in the USSR. Senior colleagues recommended that I stop trying to reconstruct a "separate women's history" and finally return from the world of my fantasies into reality.
 
Even at the end of the 1980s -- as I already worked at the Institute of Ethnology (where I still work now, and where the Women's and Gender Studies Department was established in 1990s when I became professor in Russian History) -- the "women's theme" was not recognized as important and actual at my institute.   

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Ask Aleksandra!
 
With more than two decades of experience in Slavic Studies and lots of chutzpah, she'll share with you her hard-won wisdom. Under a cloak of anonymity, you can safely ask Aleksandra anything you like, and in doing so you'll help not just yourself but probably others as well who no doubt have the same questions. Please send your questions to  awssnewsletter@gmail.com  and put "Ask Aleksandra" in the subject line.
 
 
Dear Aleksandra,
 
Several women friends and I have experienced theft of our academic work by other women. In my own case, the author of a peer-reviewed academic journal article used my unpublished research, which I presented at a conference panel she attended, as if it were her own, without attribution. In another case, the author of a peer-reviewed academic journal article copied without attribution many portions of a friend's published review essay including her original analysis of the works. In the third case, the author of a book review used text from the book under review without quotation, as if it were being paraphrased or as if it expressed the book review author's own analysis of the topic. Could you recommend how we should respond to these situations and would you please also offer some thoughts about how feminist theory addresses the dynamics of women stealing other women's intellectual property?
 
Respectfully,
Victims of Intellectual Theft
 
 
Dear Vic,
 
Yours is a serious question that contains two enmeshed, but distinct concerns: (1) the theft of intellectual property and (2) the feeling that this unethical act is a particularly egregious betrayal when it is perpetrated by a woman against a woman. 
 
Call for Nominations, 2018 AWSS Outstanding Achievement Award
 
The Outstanding Achievement Award recognizes the work of a scholar in the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies who has also served as a mentor to female students/colleagues in this field. To submit a nomination, please write a letter detailing what your candidate for this award has achieved in Slavic Studies in terms of scholarship or other professional accomplishments, as well as mentoring of female students/colleagues. In addition, please provide a short list of references with accompanying email addresses and ask these references to write a brief letter on behalf of the nominee. The committee recommends that this list include both peers and students/staff. A list of past Outstanding Achievement Award recipients is available here: http://www.awsshome.org/outstanding-achievement.html.
 
Please email your letter and accompanying materials by September 1, 2018, to Betsy Jones Hemenway (Chair) at: ehemenway@luc.edu; Paula Michaels at: paula.michaels@monash.edu; and Choi Chatterjee at: cchatte@calstatela.edu.

Call for Submissions: 2018 AWSS Graduate Research Prize
 
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Graduate Research Prize is awarded annually to fund promising graduate-level research in any field of Slavic/East European/Central Asian studies by a woman or on a topic in Women's or Gender Studies related to Slavic Studies/East Europe/Central Asia by a scholar of any gender. Graduate students who are at any stage of master's or doctoral-level research are eligible. Only graduate students are eligible for this prize.
 
The grant can be used to support expenses related to completion of a thesis or dissertation, as well as travel, services, and/or materials. The award carries a cash prize of $1000.00. Nominations and self- nominations are welcome.
 
A completed application consists of 1) a proposal that explains the project, how the funds will be used, and why this funding is necessary for continued progress on the project; 2) a CV; 3) a detailed budget and timeline, and 4) two letters of recommendation. Please submit application materials in MS Word or PDF. Winning recipients should submit a report on their use of the funds to the Committee Chair by August of the year following the receipt of the award. Recipients must be members of AWSS; if award recipients are not current AWSS members, they must join AWSS as a condition of the award.
 
Applications are due by September 1, 2018, and must be complete by that date to be considered for the award. Letters of recommendation should be forwarded to the AWSS Graduate Prize Committee Chair directly.
 
Please direct all questions and send all application materials by email attachment to the Committee Chair, Sharon Kowalsky, Associate Professor of History, Texas A&M-Commerce: Sharon.Kowalsky@tamuc.edu .

Call for Submissions: 2018 AWSS Graduate Essay Prize
 
AWSS invites submissions for the 2018 Graduate Essay Prize. The prize is awarded to the author of a chapter or article-length essay on any topic in any field or area of Slavic/East European/Central Asian Studies written by a woman, or on a topic in Slavic/East European/Central Asian Women's/Gender Studies written by a woman or a man. This competition is open to current doctoral students and to those who defended a doctoral dissertation in 2017-2018.  If the essay is a seminar paper, it must have been written during the academic year 2017-2018.  If the essay is a dissertation chapter, it should be accompanied by the dissertation abstract and table of contents.  Previous submissions and published materials are ineligible. Essays should be no longer than 50 double-spaced pages, including reference matter, and in English (quoted text in any other language should be translated). Completed submissions must be received by September 1, 2018. Please send a copy of the essay and an updated CV to each of the three members of the Prize Committee as email attachments.  Please address any questions to the chair of the prize committee.

Professor Amy Randall, Committee Chair
Associate Professor of History
Santa Clara University
arandall@scu.edu

Professor Adrienne Harris
Associate Professor of Russian
Baylor University
Adrienne_Harris@baylor.edu  (Please note underscore in this address between Adrienne and Harris)

Choi Chatterjee,
Professor of History
California State University, Los Angeles
cchatte@calstatela.edu


Call for Nominations for the Mary Zirin Prize
 
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) is pleased to announce a call for nominations for the Mary Zirin Prize in recognition of an independent scholar in the field of Slavic Studies. The award of $500 is named for Mary Zirin, the founder of Women East-West.

Working as an independent scholar, Zirin produced and encouraged fundamental works in Slavic/East European Women's Studies and has been instrumental in the development of the AWSS. The Prize aims to recognize the achievements of independent scholars and to encourage their continued scholarship and service in the fields of Slavic or Central and Eastern European Women's Studies.

The Committee encourages the nomination of candidates at all career stages. For the purpose of this award, an independent scholar is defined as a scholar who is not employed at an institution of higher learning, or an employee of a university or college who is not eligible to compete for institutional support for research (for example, those teaching under short-term contracts or working in administrative posts). We welcome nominations from CIS and Central and Eastern Europe.

The Zirin Prize Committee will accept nominations (including self-nominations) until September 1, 2018. Nominations must include: (1) a nomination letter of no more than two-pages double-spaced; (2) the nominee's current curriculum vitae; and (3) a sample publication (e.g., article or book chapter). The nomination letter must describe the scholar's contribution to the field, as well as work in progress.

Nominations should be sent to Marilyn Smith at
msmith@amherst.edu, or by postal mail to
Marilyn Schwinn Smith, 14 Allen Street, Amherst, MA 01002

Online Launch of Mary Zirin's Bibliography
 
The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Slavic Reference Service announces the compilation of Mary Zirin's bibliography of pre-Revolutionary women writers into an online bibliography of about 3500 entries. According to Annabella Irvine, SRS Research Associate, Omeka was used to compile the bibliography, which is supplemented by a collection of about 400 reference resources Zirin used. See the online bibliography and supplemental resources at:  https://zlist.omeka.net/
 
Irvine writes, "We hope this resource will both honor Mary's work and aid researchers by making her work more accessible to scholars. We welcome any feedback and suggestions regarding this new resource." Feedback should be directed to  srscite@library.illinois.edu .

Article about Nina Bichuia published in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies
 
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies , vol. 5, no. 1 (2018), edited by Dr. Svitlana Krys, features a special thematic section dedicated to the 40th Anniversary of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). Titled "Ukrainian Studies in Canada Since the 1950s," this special section describes contributions of Canadian scholars to Ukrainian studies in the fields of social sciences, linguistics, political science, folklore, and history. In addition, the present issue contains two regular articles, one of which may be of particular interest to AWSS members as it focuses on the Soviet Ukrainian women writers through the case of Lviv-based author Nina Bichuia.
 
EWJUS is a scholarly, peer-reviewed, online periodical sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta, Canada). EWJUS is an Open Access Journal, available online to everyone for free and without a subscription. Readers can register with EWJUS's site to receive future updates and can explore on the site the books EWJUS has for review. New book reviewers are always welcome. The newest issue of EWJUS may be accessed at  https://www.ewjus.com/index.php/ewjus/issue/view/13/showToc .

Message from the Book Review Editor 
 
WEW is soliciting book reviews from our readers. Below is a list of possible books. If you are interested in reviewing one of these for WEW, please contact me at Sharon.Kowalsky@tamuc.edu. Please note that most of these books are in English or published by international publishers. We encourage you to suggest other recent, non-English language works of interest to our membership, including those from the region that may not be readily available in the U.S. If you plan to travel to the region, please keep an eye out for books that your colleagues and students would like to know about. You could be our next reviewer! If you are interested in reviewing a book that is not on this list, please let me know and we can discuss that.
Sharon A Kowalsky
Sharon.Kowalsky@tamuc.edu
 
Suggested Books for Review

Athanasiou, Athena. Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Bolovan, Ioan, and Luminita Dumanescu, eds. Intermarriage in Transylvania, 1895-2010. Frankfurt am Main: New York: Peter Lang Edition, 2017.

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Book Reviews
 
Jennifer Utrata. Women Without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. 269 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Paper.
 
Reviewed by Erin Katherine Krafft, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
 
As the relationship between the citizen and the state has shifted since the dissolution of the USSR - and, indeed, had fluctuated dramatically during the Soviet period as well - definitions of the citizen, the family, and the mother have also undergone significant and sometimes unpredictable changes. There has been a pronounced trend toward single motherhood in Russia for several decades, reaching a crescendo in the early 21st century. Through extensive research, fieldwork, and interviews, Jennifer Utrata's exhaustive and detailed portrait of the many personal, interpersonal, social, ideological, and political dynamics of single motherhood explores these post-Soviet fluctuations and their implications for individuals and families in the rapidly evolving landscape of market capitalism and neo-liberalism.   

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Judith Pallot and Elena Katz, Waiting at the Prison Gate: Women, Identity and the Russian Penal System, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017. xi, 246 pp. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. ISBN: 9781784536602. $110, cloth.
 
Reviewed by: Kathleen Smith, Georgetown University
 
Starting with the familiar Russian trope of the Decembrist's wife sacrificing her comfort and position in society to follow her imprisoned husband into the wilds of Siberia, Judith Pallot and Elena Katz explore contemporary narratives about and by Russian women whose loved ones are serving time in a harsh penal system. Although Western perceptions of Russian prisons may be dominated by Stalin's GULag system, these authors remind us that Russia remains to this day a "high imprisonment society" with total numbers of prisoners trailing only China and the United States. Per capita rates also place Russia in the top ten among states. (xv) Hence, the authors observe, "The shadow of prison squats in the corners of nearly every family's life in the Russian Federation." (xvi) Waiting at the Prison Gate delivers on its promise to delve into the lives of women whose lives are transformed by their spouse, child, or father's incarceration. Pallot and Katz introduce useful terms from Western literature on the fallout of the criminal justice system - most notably "courtesy stigma" and "secondary prisonization" - to illustrate the negative impact of a sentence on a prisoner's closest relatives. 

Varga-Harris, Christine. Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Hardcover. $49.95. xvii + 289 pages. Index.
 
Reviewed by: Benjamin Sutcliffe, Miami University
 
Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years is Christine Varga-Harris's first monograph. This well-written and engaging discussion, published by Cornell University Press, focuses on letters that Leningrad residents sent to housing committees, newspapers, and officials. These, the author maintains, illuminated how citizens saw themselves as participating in a society that attempted to meet their needs. The author bases her claims on solid archival research in St. Petersburg. Varga-Harris outlines how Nikita Khrushchev revolutionized apartment policy, greatly expanding the number of separate apartments (despite many of these being shoddily constructed or inconveniently located).  
 

Member News
 
Barbara Allen (La Salle University) marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution by 1) translating and annotating sixteen Russian revolutionary leaflets, which were published on SocialistWorker.org, December 2016 - July 2017; and 2) by creating the character Alexander Shlyapnikov and tweeting for him in the #1917LIVE project, which re-enacted the Russian Revolution of 1917 in tweets.
 
Maria Bucur (Indiana University Bloomington) published a book, The Century of Women: How Women Have Transformed the World since 1900 with Rowman and Littlefield (May 2018). In April 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania.
 
Choi Chatterjee (California State University, Los Angeles) published "Imperial Subjects in the Soviet Union: Rabindranath Tagore, M. N. Roy, and Re-thinking Freedom and Authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century" in the Journal of Contemporary History, no. 4 (October 2017), 913-934.
 
Lisa Kirschenbaum (West Chester University) announces that her book, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press) has been published in paperback.
 
Svitlana (Lana) Krys (MacEwan University) is pleased to announce the publication of the winter issue of East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (2018). Dr. Krys serves as EWJUS's editor-in-chief.
 
Katerina Liskova (Masaryk University) announces the publication of her book Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style. Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945-89 (Cambridge University Press). She writes, "This is the first account of sexual liberation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War."
 
Natalie McCauley (University of Michigan) will begin work in Fall 2018 as Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Richmond. McCauley recently won the University of Michigan award for Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor.
 
Olena Nikolayenko (Fordham University) published the book,  Youth Movements and Elections in Eastern Europe  (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which examine s nonviolent youth movements in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine.