Association for Women in Slavic Studies Women East-West Issue Number 97 Winter 2009 2008 AWSS AWARDS EDITOR (AAASS National Convention, Philadelphia, November 22, 2008) Nicole Monnier BIBLIOGRAPHIC EDITOR June Pachuta Farris BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Betsy Jones Hemenway BOOK REVIEWS Erin K. Biebuyck Sara Dickinson Contents FAWSS organizational news: 2008 AAASS awards .............1-4 News of members .................... 4 AWSS Travel Grants report...... 5 2008 Outstanding Achievement Award winner Christine Worobec and AWSS president AWSS BOARD ELECTIONS Margaret Beissinge Candidate statements .......6-9 r Ballots (A, B) ................... 8, 9 The annual AWSS luncheon and business meeting took place November 22, Note: Ballots due February 15th! 2008. What follows are the announcements for the annual prizes awarded at the luncheon. (Ed. note: For space reasons, the announcements for the graduate Book reviews ...................10-11 student awards will appear in the spring edition of WEW.–NM) Bibliography ...................12-19 CHRISTINE D. WOROBEC: 2008 AWSS Outstanding Achievement Award Outstanding Achievement Award committee members were Margaret Announcements ...............20-22 Beissinger, Jill Irvine, and Janneke van de Stadt; Margaret Beissinger read Membership renewal form ...23 the following text at the awards ceremony I take great pleasure in offering the Outstanding Achievement Award, which F Renew your 2009 AWSS recognizes superior scholarship on women’s and gender issues and exceptional membership - or start a mem- mentorship in the field among scholars and students, to Christine D. Worobec. bership for a new colleague Professor Worobec is a Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, where or grad student (always the she has taught since 1999. From 2003 to 2007 she was the Presidential Research perfect gift)! Professor there, and has also taught as an Associate Professor and Assistant Professor Mail-in new membership / at Kent State University from 1992 to 1999 and 1984 to 1992 respectively. Professor renewal forms are available in Worobec was Director of the Soviet and East European Studies Program at Kent State every issue of WEW. University from 1991 to 1999 and has also taught at Harvard University Summer School. Issue number 97 Page 2 Christine Worobec received her B.A. in History at in organizing events in women’s and gender history, and the University of Toronto in 1977 and her Ph.D., also in her personal concern for identifying and encouraging History at Toronto, in 1984. She has authored numerous promising women in the field.” In short, she “has been articles and books, all of them valuable and important unflaggingly supportive.” contributions to the field of Russian history. Among Over and over as we on the committee for the them I would like to point out the books that she has Outstanding Achievement Award read what others had to written or edited: Ukrainians in North America: A Select say about Professor Worobec, we found the same accolades: Bibliography, compiled with Halyna Myroniuk (University fantastic and original scholar, quintessential teacher and of Minnesota Immigration History Research Center and mentor, and steadfast champion of women in academia. We Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1981); Russia’s unanimously concluded that Professor Worobec is indeed Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, co- a superb scholar, a trailblazer in introducing women’s edited with Barbara E. Clements and Barbara A. Engel studies to our profession, a demanding and sympathetic (University of California Press, 1991); Peasant Russia: mentor, and a model for other women. We are delighted Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period to award Christine Worobec for her extraordinary and (Princeton University Press, 1991), which won the 1991 outstanding achievements! AWSS Heldt Prize for the best book written by a woman; Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial ޼ Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), which won the 2001 AWSS Heldt Prize for the best book in HELDT AWARDS 2008 Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women’s Studies; Women The AWSS Heldt Awards Committee announced the and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and recipients of three Heldt prizes. Committee members Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography, co-edited with were Maria Bucur, Choi Chatterjee, Helena Goscilo Mary Zirin, Irina Livezeanu, and June Pachuta-Farris and Sarah Phillips; Maria Bucur read the following (M.E. Sharpe, 2006); and forthcoming, an edited volume, texts at the ceremony. The Human Tradition in Imperial Russia (Rowman & Littlefield 2009). ELIOT BORENSTEIN: Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women’s studies Professor Worobec is, to quote from a colleague, “renowned for her pioneering scholarship on the history of In his new book Overkill: Sex and Violence in women, folklore, peasants, family, religion and social life Contemporary Russian Political Culture (Cornell among Russians and Ukrainians in late Imperial Russia.... University Press, 2007) Eliot Borenstein, takes the reader Not only is Professor Worobec a fine model of thoughtful on a dizzying journey through the many fictional sites of scholarship, she is also a superb model to young scholars.” popular culture in post-Soviet Russia. As we read the book, Another writes that “Christine Worobec is a model for all we felt that we were walking down the Arbat, but instead of us in the Slavic field. Her scholarship is exemplary– of averting our eyes from the ubiquitous pornography and meticulous research, careful argumentation, and wonderful hurrying towards the Leninka, we were forced to stop and insights into the lives of Russian and Ukrainian peasants.... actually consider the meanings embedded in the products In addition to her scholarly contributions, Christine has that were on sale. What did images of spread-eagled air- worked very hard to advance Slavic women’s studies. She brushed nudes say about the changing norms of femininity has been one of the guiding forces behind the Association in Russia? In a despairing nation, ruled by a decrepit and for Women in Slavic Studies, serving on the Executive buffoonish Yelstin, could compensatory codes of violent Board, as President and Vice-President, and as one of the masculinity repair the damaged narratives of nation editors on the Bibliography project in Slavic women’s and empire? Borenstein is intent on locating excess, the studies . Christine has been unstinting as a mentor to exuberant excess of sex and violence, as well the excess her peers and younger women scholars, offering sage of despair that characterized Russian popular fiction and advice to help us navigate the troubled waters of American films after the fall of the Soviet Union. Writing with an academia.” Students who have worked with Professor enviable verve, Borenstein makes intriguing and insightful Worobec also comment on her as a remarkable scholar, connections between critical theories, both Western teacher, and advocate. As one recalls, “Since I first began and Russian, Russian literary traditions, and the current working in Russian history, Christine has been a major themes in contemporary Russian pornography, erotica, force in welcoming women into the professional life of detective fiction and films. The analytic triage speaks both the field, through her pioneering research, her activism to his erudition, and his ability to identify the symptoms of Issue number 97 Page 3 Russian cultural malaise. We praise him for his ironic prose which appeared in Slavic Review (vol. 66, no. 2, 2007, and for his deep insight into post-Soviet popular culture. pp. 230-256), Abby M. Schrader brings into focus a Finally, we commend him for his synchronic analysis number of questions and analytical perspectives that of the norms of masculinity and femininity in Russian demonstrate effectively the importance of gender analysis popular culture. For those of us engaged in gender studies, for understanding tsarist Russia. The process of Siberian it is a salutary reminder that holistic studies are indeed the colonization has been the subject of attention for a number wave of the future. of scholars, but Abby Schrader is the first to ask exactly what did the gender imbalance of this process mean for the CATHERINE WANNER: Best book by a woman in any larger project of social engineering taking place there. The area of Slavic/East European/Eurasian studies author skillfully shows how gender expectations helped In Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and generate specific policies of population movement and Global Evangelism (Cornell University Press, 2007) control. She also demonstrates that this kind of biopolitics Catherine Wanner makes a major contribution to the resulted in readings of the failures in Siberia through growing body of research on communal and personal gendered lens of social (dis)order and agency. Thus, Abby religious life, and transformations in religious practice in Schrader shows, women served as both tools of control at the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. The committee was the outset (enabling the state to formally settle the exiled particularly impressed by the scope of Wanner’s multi-sited men), and eventually as scapegoats for these policies’ lack study, which benefited not only from archival research, but of success. What the committee considered as exemplary in also from extensive ethnographic field research in Ukraine this article is a combination of first rate historical research and