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2009 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize Winner
The AAASS Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) and the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published English in the United States in the previous calendar year.
Adeeb Khalid
The 2008 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize was awarded to Adeeb Khalid, for Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia, published by the University of California Press.
With a finely tuned appreciation for the work of historical consciousness, cultural frames, and theological reason, Adeeb Khalid takes today’s “Central Asian problem,” and turns it on its head in this bravura study of how seven decades of Soviet rule deeply transformed religious and social action in contemporary Central Asia. Drawing on a diverse, polyglot range of sources, he shows the multiple ways by which socialist rule redefined the contours of Islamic practice in the USSR. Where scholars and commentators before him have been ready to declare Soviet-era Islam a unified democratic resistance movement only to later, paradoxically, proclaim post-Soviet Islam to be a threat, and in an age where Central Asian political networks are often primitivized through readings of their basis in clan or tribal structures, Khalid offers close readings of archival sources, memoirs, ethnographic record, and interviews to suggest a predominantly Muslim world area that is by no means antiquated or isolated from the political transformations across the formerly socialist world. Canons old and new are challenged in this finely written and elegant study.
2008 Vucinich Book Prize Honorable Mentions
The prize committee also decided to recognize two honorable mentions:
- Chad Bryant received an honorable mention for Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism published by Harvard University Press
- John Randolph received an honorable mention for A House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, published by Cornell University Press. (A House in the Garden was also the winner of the 2008 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize.)
(Please click on the name of the winner to see the citation for the award.)
