Association

Ассоциация

Book Prize

The Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor & Francis
Book Prize in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

The Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor & Francis Book Prize was established in 2014 and is sponsored by Taylor & Francis Publishers.  It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies published in the previous calendar year by a Canadian author (citizen or permanent resident). 

Winner of the 2025 Prize

We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Canadian Association of Slavists / Taylor and Francis Book Prize in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies will be awarded to Dr. Natalie Cornett’s The Politics of Love: Gender and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Cornell UP, 2024).
 
In its final report, the book prize committee offers the following commendation: “The Politics of Love investigates nineteenth-century Polish nationalism from the point of view of gender politics. It focuses on the “Enthusiasts” (Entuzjastki), a group of educated women who came together in the years between Poland’s two great uprisings to engage with the important social and political issues of the day. Cornett’s book is very timely; it examines not only a particular historical context, but more broadly the problems of what has become known as intersectionality in contemporary political discourse. She examines the ways in which the Polish intelligentsia’s single-minded focus on the independence struggle allowed it to dismiss other social questions, such as the role of women in a future, independent Poland. Cornett shows both the reputational damage that the Enthusiasts suffered as a result of their attempts to widen the scope of the nationalist cause and the compensatory nature of the close relationships they shared with each other. Beautifully written, melding together social and intellectual history, and drawing on a kaleidoscope of different perspectives and sources, the book brings a forgotten group of women to the centre of the stage, allowing their voices to be heard and providing a new and immensely valuable perspective onto the history of Poland’s independence movement in the nineteenth century. In the process, it has much to contribute to contemporary debates about nationalism, gender, intersectionality, and the patriarchy.”
Special thanks to the book prize committee members (Drs. Kate Holland, Piotr Wrobel, and Serhy Yekelchyk) for their hard work and, of course, congratulations to Drs. Natalie Cornett!

List of Past Book Prize Winners

2024: Natalie Kononenko, Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies: Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023)

2023: Ann Komaromi, Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).

2022: John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944 (Stuttgart: Ibidem Press, 2021)

2021: Megan Swift, Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020)

2020: Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019)

2019: Zina Gimpelevich, The Portrayal of Jews in Modern Bielarusian Literature (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018)

2018: Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

2017: Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

2016: Myroslav Shkandrij, Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929-1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

2015: Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).N