President's Message
Dear members and friends of gender and women's scholarship in Slavic Studies,
As we enter another two-year cycle of AWSS Presidency, I want to introduce myself and mention a few new features and initiatives of this organization. I am a historian of gender in Eastern Europe, with a specific interest in Romania, and recently on memory and war. Having just completed a book entitled Heroes and Victims. Remembering War in Twentieth Century Romania (Indiana University Press, 2009), I am now concentrating my research on a transnational comparative study that looks at lived citizenship in rural-urban areas in the United States and Eastern Europe, with a focus on women's lives and gender analysis. Based on oral histories and an interdisciplinary theoretically informed framework of analysis, the study asks how have legal enfranchisement and various other forms of institutional empowerment resulted in specific individualized results for women living in these two parts of the world, of either progress or frustrated expectations. I also teach and train undergraduate and graduate students in gender history, east European history, and cultural history (focusing especially on memory and history).
In addition to my own work on gender, I am deeply committed through this organization and in other areas of scholarly activity to making visible women's scholarship and work on women and gender. I am the network coordinator for Gender and Women's history for the European Social Science History Conference. I am also active in forwarding the publication of original research on gender and women's history in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe as a co-editor of Aspasia.
Some of the changes ongoing in the profile and focus of the AWSS are already visible in this website, and I very much hope you will also become an active member in generating a vibrant network and community of scholars with similar interests. The AWSS board has recently decided to include 'gender' as an important denominator for all relevant prizes awarded by the AWSS, moving us into an area of greater diversity of scholarship to be represented through our organization. This represents by no means a diminished commitment to de-marginalizing/empowering women scholars and work focusing on women as subjects. It is merely a reflection of and commitment to the greater diversity of angles that the scholarship in our field of Slavic and East European Studies has embraced in the recent past, most prominently by making 'gender' the main theme at the AAASS Convention in 2008.
AWSS has also begun to have a presence on Facebook. Please take the time to visit that site and become a member, so that we can interact more easily as a group via the Internet. This is also a good place to spread the word about the activities of the AWSS, and especially all the awards that we give out each year. Please help us improve the membership of our great organization by 'friending' others who may be interested in AWSS. Our membership is a mere $10/year for a graduate student and $30/year for a regular membership. That is less than the cost of our coffee intake/month. So please renew your membership regularly and consider also becoming a lifetime member for a mere $300.
In April 2009, Ohio State University is hosting a conference organized by AWSS and entitled "Citizenship and Empire". Our next conference initiative will be for 2011, and I very much hope you will send me your ideas for conference topics. It is never too soon to start planning the next conference...
I want to thank the AWSS Board and Officers for all their dedication and hard work. We all have busy lives and work in other capacities, and doing this kind of volunteering work is a great model I hope I can live up to throughout my life. I encourage you to do the same!
Maria Bucur
AWSS President, 2009-2011