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Book Prize

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

Call for Nominations: 2026 Canadian Association of Slavists/Taylor & Francis Book Prize

The Canadian Association of Slavists’ 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).

The book prize jury consists of three members chosen by the CAS executive. Nominations for the 2026 Book Prize competition are to be postmarked by 15 May 2026. The prize winner will be announced by e-mail to CAS members and on the CAS/CSP website in autumn 2026. The winner receives a cash award of $500 CAD and recognition at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists. A roundtable on the winning book will be published in Canadian Slavonic Papers.

Rules of Eligibility
• The copyright date inside the book must list the previous calendar year as the date of publication (the book must have been published in 2025 to be eligible for the 2026 competition).
• The book must be in the form of a monograph, preferably by a single author, or by no more than two authors.
• Authors must be citizens or permanent residents of Canada.
• At least one author of the book must be a member of CAS in the year the book is nominated.
• The work must originally be published in French or English (either in or outside Canada).
• Works may deal with any aspect of Slavic, East European, or Eurasian Studies (languages, literatures, cinemas, cultures, visual arts, politics, history, etc.).
• Textbooks in the strict sense of the word do not qualify, but a broad interpretive work of a major period or area qualifies.
• Translations, bibliographies, reference works, edited volumes, and smaller works such as pamphlets are not eligible.

Nominating Instructions
• Nomination for the prize can come from an author, a publisher, or a third party. There is no limit on the number of entries a publisher may submit.
• Send an e-mail message to Dr. Natalie Cornett at csp-books.rcs-livres@mcgill.ca to notify the Canadian Association of Slavists of your intent to nominate a publication for the CAS/Taylor & Francis Book Prize. Include publication information about the book. Please copy this e-mail to yourself, too.
• After verifying eligibility, Dr. Cornett will arrange with the press’s representative or the author to send one copy of the eligible monograph to each member of the book prize jury.
• Book nominations should be clearly marked “CAS/T&F Book Prize Nomination” and must be postmarked by 15 May 2026.
• Please note that books sent to members of the jury will not normally be returned once the competition is over. However, special arrangements to return a book may be made between a jury member and nominator after the competition ends.

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 has been awarded to Dr. Natalie Cornett for The Politics of Love: Gender and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Cornell University Press, 2024).
 
In its final report, the book prize jury 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 jury members (Kate Holland, Piotr Wróbel, and Serhy Yekelchyk) for their hard work and, of course, congratulations to Dr. 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