Ce prix de l’Association canadienne des slavistes a été créé en 2014 et est commandité par les éditeurs Taylor & Francis. Il est remis chaque année au meilleur livre académique dans le domaine des études slaves, est-européennes et eurasiennes publiées au cours de l’année civile précédente par un auteur canadien (citoyen ou résident permanent).

La gagnante du prix 2026

Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer que le prix Taylor & Francis pour le meilleur livre en études slaves, est-européennes et eurasiennes de l’Association canadienne des slavistes 2026 a était décerné à Lilia Topouzova pour Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag (Cornell University Press, 2025)

Dans son rapport final, le comité du prix pour le meilleur livre offre la mention suivante : « Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag is a tour-de-force of scholarship that dazzled the committee with its breadth, depth, and quality of analysis. Spanning twenty years of work in four languages and dealing with a subject that historians have largely neglected to this point, Unsilencing is extremely well written and conceived while dealing with a hitherto fragmentary and complex historiography. Topouzova tells not only the story of the Bulgarian Gulag (particularly the Belene and Lovech camps), but also the story of how this difficult chapter in twentieth-century Bulgarian history was deliberately obfuscated, concealed, and overwritten. She painstakingly documents the January 1990 destruction order for 144,235 files and explains its significance. Engaging with previous attempts to define and engage with the Gulag’s legacy, Topouzova revises Tzvetan Todorov’s camp/prison distinction. Finally, the committee was impressed with Topouzova’s interpretation of Lovech’s extreme violence as a product of half-implemented de-Stalinization rather than a return to it. It was also refreshing to see how candid Topouzova is about what her sources cannot bear. »

Nous sommes également heureux d’annoncer que deux ouvrages ont reçu une mention honorable : 

Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder par Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) « examines the problem of Poland’s “prisoners of the fourth floor” – elderly people with disabilities who are socially and economically marginalized. Kazubowski-Houston has written a methodologically inventive work, which blends ethnography with improvisational methods taken from theatre to focus on the life of a Romani fortune teller and storyteller. Kazubowski-Houston’s experimentation pays off: her comparison of interviews with storytelling sessions with the same person reveals two distinct subjectivities and serves to make Randia a figure for “prisoners of the fourth floor” more broadly. Kazubowski-Houston’s concept of “awkward reflexivity” is a genuinely portable concept. »

Relief on the Hoof: The Seagoing Cowboys, The Heifer Project, and UNRRA in Poland par Eva Plach (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025) « tells the surprising story of the horses and cattle shipped to Poland by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the aftermath of World War II and of the “seagoing cowboys” who looked after them, who were recruited by the Church of the Brethren as part of their humanitarian Heifer Project. The jury found Relief on the Hoof’s object of research to be truly original and pathbreaking. Plach’s multilayered field of study brings together an impressive transatlantic archive and provides a rich set of answers to the questions it poses about how different institutions and communities understood relief, rehabilitation, and humanitarianism following the devastation of the Second World War. »

Merci aux membres du comité du prix du livre (Kate Holland, Roman Krakowsky, et Ivan Simic) pour leur travail et, bien sûr, félicitations aux Lilia Topouzova, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston et Eva Plach!

Liste des anciens gagnants du prix

2025: Natalie Cornett, The Politics of Love: Gender and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Cornell University Press, 2024)

2024: Natalie Kononenko, Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies: Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity (Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 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 & 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).