The Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the Mary Zirin Prize in recognition of an independent scholar in the field of Slavic Studies. The award of $500 is named for Mary Zirin, the founder of Women East-West.

Working as an independent scholar, Zirin produced and encouraged fundamental works in Slavic/East European Women’s Studies and has been instrumental in the development of the AWSS. The Prize aims to recognize the achievements of independent scholars and to encourage their continued scholarship and service in the fields of Slavic or Central and Eastern European Women’s Studies.

The Zirin Prize is open to scholars of any gender in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. We particularly encourage applications from those whose scholarship or service focuses on women’s or gender studies.

The Committee encourages the nomination of candidates from all career stages. For the purpose of this award, an independent scholar is defined as a scholar who is not employed at an institution of higher learning, or who is employed at a university or college but is not eligible to compete for institutional support for research (for example, those teaching under short-term contracts or working in administrative posts). We welcome nominations from Central and Eastern Europe and from Eurasia.

Nominations must include: (1) a nomination letter, no more than two pages long, double-spaced; (2) the nominee’s updated curriculum vitae; (3) a sample publication (e.g., article or book chapter). The nomination letter should describe the scholar’s contribution to the field, as well as work in progress.

Please direct all inquiries and nomination materials to Zirin Prize Committee Chair: Darya Tsymbalyuk, Chair: tsymbalyuk@uchicago.edu

Deadline: Nominations (including self-nominations) will be accepted until September 1, 2025.

Mary Zirin Prize Committee: Darya Tsymbalyuk (chair), Aleksandra Jakubczak, Olga Makarova, Elena Trubina

The 2025 Mary Zirin Prize is awarded to Svitlana Biedarieva.

The Committee finds Svitlana Biedarieva to be a force of theoretical contribution to the field, multimodal engagement in knowledge-making through scholarly writing and creative practice, and incessant commitment to building international communities, where her dedication to creating dialogues between Eastern Europe and Latin America is of special significance.

Biedarieva is an art historian with a particular focus on decolonial and postcolonial approaches to the study of Russo-Ukrainian relations. The Committee was especially impressed by her recently published monograph Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) in which she untangles Russia’s fixation with subjugating Ukraine. To do this, Biedarieva situates Russo-Ukrainian relations within a broader tradition of decolonial and postcolonial studies and offers an original theoretical framework of ambicoloniality grounded in the experience of a shared border, hybridity and history of exchange and mutual impact between the two countries.

Biedarieva is a prolific author, with her first monograph, Ambicoloniality and War, not being her first book. After obtaining her PhD in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK in 2020, Biedarieva edited two book volumes Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991-2021 (ibidem, 2021) and Art in Ukraine: Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (Routledge, 2024), as well as authored numerous book chapters and articles (published in at least four languages) in Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Space and Culture, Art Margins Online, and October, to name just a few.

The Committee was also impressed by Biedarieva’s interdisciplinary activity. In addition to her rich scholarly work, Biedarieva is a practicing curator and an artist. She curated several art exhibitions on Ukraine in Mexico, where she is based. Among these exhibitions is At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019/ La línea del frente. El arte ucraniano, 2013-2019, an exhibition and a public program co-curated with Hanna Deikun in 2019-2020, which was the biggest event dedicated to Ukrainian art in Mexico. When it comes to her own art practice, Biedarieva’s art project The Morphology of War (2017) was exhibited at Museo Erasto Cortes in Puebla, Mexico, the National Centre of Arts in Mexico City, the 5th International Biennial of Odesa in Ukraine, #00 Biennial of Havana, National Museum of Cultures in Mexico City, London School of Economics and Political Science in London, Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Tallinn, and East Hawaii Cultural Center in Hilo.

Finally, the Committee wants to recognize Biedarieva’s service for the field. She has been actively involved in building scholarly communities and networks of knowledge-exchange. She is a founder of Ukraine Decolonial Studies Network and President-Elect of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA). Biedarieva is also an editor of the Harvard History of Ukrainian Art book series.

While representing the full impact and diversity of Biedarieva’s work is beyond the scope of this letter, we remain in an awe of her impressive multimodal body of work and her impact on our field.

Honorable Mention: Megan Buskey

Buskey is an outstanding independent scholar who combines the rigor of academic research with a highly engaging and impactful writing style that bridges academic and general audiences. Her first monograph, Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (2023), published by ibidem Press and distributed by Columbia University Press, received the 2024 Book of the Year Award from the American Association of Ukrainian Studies. It was also positively reviewed by The Financial Times, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other distinguished media. These reviews and the award testify to the contribution Buskey’s work made to both academic debate and public discussion on Ukraine, which given the ongoing violence of the Russian full-scale invasion remains as urgent as ever.

Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet traces Buskey’s family history, masterfully placing the personal within a larger historical context. The Committee had the honor to read a chapter from a forthcoming new book by Buskey, focused on histories and communities of Kyiv. Just as in Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet, what impressed us the most is Buskey’s commitment to address and examine complex and contested realities of Ukraine’s society with sensitivity and depth. Rooted in personal (hi)stories, whether her own or the interlocutors she meets, the strength of Buskey’s writing lies in making these complicated and at times confusing contexts and memory debates relatable to a wide range of readers. Moreover, Buskey’s engaging and accessible prose propels one to read and learn more.

In the time of a growing loss of faith in academia and in the context of the ongoing Russia’s war in Ukraine and rising authoritarianism in our region and beyond, Buskey’s work, rooted in research and engaging broader audiences, provides a direction for re-imagining the role of knowledge and scholarship in our ever more precarious world.

Honorable Mention: Kathleen Cioffi

Cioffi exemplifies the very values that this prize seeks to celebrate: intellectual rigor, service for the field, and a commitment to advancing Slavic Studies. For over two decades, Cioffi has pursued an extraordinary path of scholarship outside the academic framework. Although operating outside academia, her contributions stand among the most influential in the field of her specialization – Polish Theatre Studies. Her landmark monograph, Alternative Theatre in Poland, 1954–1989 (Routledge, 1996), remains a foundational text in Polish and Slavic Theatre Studies. Widely taught in classrooms and frequently cited, it received multiple prizes and continues to shape how scholars and students alike understand the complex landscape of Polish cultural and political life in the late twentieth century.

Beyond her own research, Cioffi has made profound and sustained contributions to the field through her editorial work. Her incisive book reviews and review essays have illuminated key debates in Slavic Theatre Studies. The volumes she has edited have helped define and reorient the field. As Senior Production Editor at Princeton University Press, Cioffi plays an equally vital role in expanding the reach of Polish scholarship. Through her editorial guidance and commitment to advancing Slavic Studies, she has brought major works written in Polish to a broad English-speaking audience.

The committee was especially moved by the testimony to Cioffi’s exceptional mentorship—a quality unmatched among this year’s nominees. A letter of recommendation from a professor whom Cioffi mentored at the beginning of her academic career spoke with deep admiration and gratitude, describing her influence as formative and lasting. Through her generosity, intellectual guidance, and editorial insight, Cioffi has shaped generations of scholars in Polish and Slavic Studies.

In honoring Cioffi, we celebrate not only an independent scholar of remarkable list of

accomplishments, but also a dedicated mentor, editor, and bridge-builder who has tirelessly advanced the study of Polish culture. Her career stands as a model of how scholarship can thrive—and transform a field—even outside the walls of academia.

The 2025 Mary Zirin Prize Committee was Chaired by Darya Tsymbalyuk, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, University of Chicago;

Aleksandra Jakubczak, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Technische Universität Berlin;

Olga Makarova, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library;

Ileana Nachescu, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University