The 2023 Patricia Herlihy Graduate Research Prize is awarded to Anna Smelova, PhD Candidate at Georgetown University, for “Imagining Indigenous Siberia: Populist Ethnography of Northeast Asia Under Russian Late Imperial and Early Soviet Regimes.” Smelova’s unique prosopographic project critically analyzes Siberian ethnography conducted by political exiles during the late tsarist and early Soviet periods, whose ethnographic work was undertaken not from the positionality of agents of empire, but rather as anti-tsarist, anti-imperialists who held revolutionary views about indigeneity and class (wherein they often projected idealist notions onto indigenous peoples similar to those associated with the peasantry). The specific chapter to be funded by the award engages with the writings of exiled ethnographers’ wives about the indigenous peoples of northeastern Siberia. As such, her work promises to deepen and broaden our understanding of Russian Orientalism and grapple with major questions about the relationship between power and knowledge. Filling significant gaps in scholarship, as there has been very little post-colonialist analysis of Russian and Soviet anthropology and ethnology, Smelova’s work addresses the particularly conspicuous absence of the gender dimension. It holds great potential to reconfigure and update older debates in the Russian field about Orientalism, experts, and the state by closely examining how ethnographers were both critics and shapers, participants and victims in not one but two imperial formations.

2023 Herlihy Graduate Research Prize Committee: Dr. Laurie S. Stoff, Dr. Andrea Orzoff, Dr. Ania Switzer