AWSS 2023 Outstanding Achievement Award: Dr. Catherine Wanner

The AWSS Outstanding Achievement Award is given in recognition of exceptional scholarly accomplishments and academic leadership in the field of Slavic, East European and Eurasian women’s and gender studies. It commends those who have become established figures in the field both through scholarly work that has laid the groundwork for others and through the mentoring of female students and colleagues. As such, it is an award that is central to the very definition of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies and its mission. AWSS is delighted to present its 2023 Outstanding Achievement Award to Dr. Catherine Wanner, professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University and currently Jacyk Distinguished Fellow (2023-2024) at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

After receiving her PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 1996, Dr. Wanner went on to publish what today stands at three monographs, four edited and co-edited volumes, and well-over 50 scholarly articles. She is, to quote the nomination letter submitted by Hilde Hoogenboom, Associate Professor of Russian at Arizona State University, “an internationally recognized anthropologist and pioneer in her field”: “Since Wanner first embarked on her distinguished career three decades ago, both anthropology and the critical study of religion are no longer nascent disciplines in Ukraine.” Indeed, Catherine Wanner “has helped to create a vibrant new intellectual community in Ukraine, and to make Ukraine itself a major focus of study in the social sciences and the humanities internationally.” Post-Soviet cultural anthropology, the critical study of religion, and the study of Ukraine are three fields that Catherine Wanner has enriched through her scholarship, her indefatigable construction of networks, and her dedicated mentoring.

Catherine Wanner’s wide-ranging research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council and the National Council for Eastern European and Eurasian Research. In 2016-17 she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology of Humboldt University in Berlin and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine.

Oksana Kis, Senior Scholar at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, characterizes Wanner as “one of those few courageous and open-minded Western scholars who dared to explore the tumultuous post-Soviet world directly.” Her research, says Kis, “always addresses the most topical issues”, whether “women’s strategies of coping with poverty or the challenges of (re)constructing national identity in post-soviet Ukraine in the 1990s, or the role of faith during the Revolution of Dignity and the military hostilities on Donbas, or the manifestations and meaning of sorrow, care and empathy in the context of traumatic experiences suffered during Russia’s war against Ukraine.” Her work “confronts painful and complicated issues”, confirms Michele Rivkin-Fish, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill, adducing as examples “the revival of religious and nationalist sentiment after state socialism, the violence of the Maidan and war in Eastern Ukraine, the ruptures between Russian and Ukrainian families.” Dr. Wanner’s writing is “richly textured, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply innovative,” she adds, it “both reveals and grapples with human suffering and the efforts to heal from these conflicts, both witnesses and analyzes, with subtlety and nuance.”

Catherine Wanner’s first book, Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1998) “set the standard for the newly emerging field of the anthropology of Ukraine – and Eastern Europe in general,” in the view of Sarah D. Phillips, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, quickly becoming a “must-read for all social scientists studying the region”, even a “fieldwork Bible.” Recently translated into Ukrainian, the book is short-listed for the 2023 Sophia Book of the Year in the category of Non-Fiction Philosophy, Anthropology, and Psychology.

Dr. Wanner’s next two monographs, “explore how and why religion has become such a crucial force in Ukrainian public life and geopolitics,” writes Heather Coleman, Professor of History at the University of Alberta: like her first book, they, too, “grow out of the insights of ‘slow ethnography’ – years and years of time spent talking to people, developing relationships, and observing Ukrainian social and public life.” The book Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (2007) has been dubbed by Bruce Grant, Professor of Anthropology at NYU, a “tour de force for critical thinking on religion in society” and it won four prizes, including the AWSS Heldt Prize. Meanwhile, her volume on Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (2022) is still collecting accolades, among them the Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies and an Honorable Mention for the AWSS Heldt Prize awarded for the best book introducing Innovative and Underrepresented Perspectives in Slavic Studies.

War in Ukraine has been a theme in Dr. Wanner’s work for a decade now and is the subject of three collections of articles on the Maidan protests, a forthcoming edited volume entitled Dispossession: Imperial Legacies and the Russo-Ukrainian War, and special issues of the journals Ethnologia Polona and Material Religion. Since the invasion, she has been a leader in promoting what she calls the “militant middle ground” – a position of “open and non-judgmental engagement” with persons of different views.

Dr. Wanner’s networking activities began in the early 1990s, when together with fellow graduate students Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries, she organized a workshop and with it the “Soyuz Research Network for Post-Communist Cultural Studies” to help graduate students navigate the rapidly changing fields of anthropology and sociology in the Soviet and post-Soviet context; this workshop has since become an annual event and Soyuz now has over 500 members. Insofar as Soyuz was designed to be – as Bruce Grant put it – “flexible and maximally inclusive,” it resembles numerous other networks that Dr. Wanner has gone on to build over the course of her career, an activity that Grant speaks of as “institution building.”

A case in point is the “Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia” (formerly known as the “Working Group on Religion in the Black Sea Region”), “a long-term project that aims to enhance the critical study of religion as a discipline of anthropology and the use of qualitative research methods” (Kis). Over that last ten years, Dr. Wanner has secured over $800,000 in funding for the Working Group, which supports doctoral students and postdocs, as well as established scholars from Eurasia and Eastern Europe, bringing them together at international and interdisciplinary events, including regular conferences, online seminars, workshops for junior scholars, graduate student summer schools, also supporting seven Ukrainian scholars per year. Here as elsewhere, Heather Coleman writes, “Wanner has created a wonderful, inclusive intellectual community, fostering very high-level discussions in a supportive atmosphere.” The results of this “international scholarly conversation” are often publications, such as her “groundbreaking collected volume”, State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (2012), that included several chapters by Ukrainian colleagues, here given an opportunity to publish in English, or her “volume in Ukrainian co-edited with a young Ukrainian scholar and making available new work on the anthropology of religion in Ukraine, Russia, and the Caucasus” (Coleman).

In short, Catherine Wanner has demonstrated an enduring and powerful “commitment to building community, strengthening the field, and supporting colleagues”, in the words of Rivkin-Fish. And, as Hoogenboom points out, has been “a central node in keeping the Ukrainian academic community connected to the world community of scholars, including Russians.” In fact, while much of her work has focused on Ukraine, her networks are international and her mentorship extends broadly to scholars from the former Soviet Union, including Petersburg, Tbilisi, and Buriatiya, whom she helps with grant proposals, workshops, and English-language publishing. Dr. Wanner’s remarkable successes are aided by her fluency in Ukrainian, Russian, German, and French, and for her talents in mentoring.

As a generous and energetic mentor, Catherine Wanner is nothing short of revered. Oksana Kis credits Dr. Wanner with “possessing the rare talent of mentoring without patronizing, thus facilitating the professional growth of her mentees and guiding and supporting a number of young scholars to become her full-fledged colleagues and collaborators.” “She is deeply empathic and an excellent listener,” explains Rivkin-Fish, and “she recognizes the multiple complexities and challenges involved in successfully navigating academia, particularly as a woman and a mother.” Sarah Phillips praises her “absolute lack of scholarly ‘territoriality’,” stating that “My career has benefitted at every level from Cathy’s interest in my work,” that “She has offered me meticulous feedback for the last 23 years,” and that she “has been a pivotal influence for several of my own PhD students.”

Indeed, Dr. Wanner is well-known for mentoring across generations, reaching not only students and young career scholars, but also her peers and even her seniors. Tetiana Kalenychenko, National Pedagogical Dragomanov University (Kyiv) and coordinator of the Working Group, recalls Dr. Wanner guiding “older scholars to recognize the value of qualitative methods,” for example. Her work has also been particularly important for women scholars, creating the “pathways for significant numbers of East European and Eurasian women to develop academic careers” (Rivkin-Fish) and helping to “restructure the previously male-dominated world of Ukrainian Studies (and Russian Studies) into something entirely more gender-inclusive” (Grant).

As Hoogenboom notes, “through both her scholarship and mentorship, Catherine Wanner has advised and supported the first cohort of post-Soviet anthropologists, sociologists, and religious studies scholars from the U.S., Europe, and the former Soviet Union.” A “leader for what is now an entire generation of younger scholars in the anthropology of the former Soviet Union,” writes Bruce Grant, she “genuinely cuts across the disciplines, demonstrating a global edge in her intuitive reach.”

Much more was written than can be included here about Dr. Wanner’s formidable achievements. Backed by these impressive testimonials, it gives AWSS great pleasure to confer the 2023 Outstanding Achievement Award on Dr. Catherine Wanner, wonderfully described by Coleman, as “a gifted scholar, a valued mentor, and an engaged colleague.”