American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies

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The Graduate Student Essay Prize is awarded for an outstanding essay by a graduate student in Slavic studies.

The winner of the competition receives free airfare to and room at the AAASS National Convention and an honorary AAASS membership for the following year. The prize is presented during the awards presentation at the National Convention.

Committee on the Student Prize

The 2009 winner of the AAASS Graduate Student Essay Prize will be chosen by the AAASS Committee on the Student Prize:

Rules of eligibility and Nominating Instructions

Rules of eligibility and Nominating Instructions for the AAASS Graduate Student Essay Prize competition are as follows:

AAASS Regional Affiliates and Institutional Members are invited to hold their own competitions for best essay among their graduate students, and submit the winning paper to the AAASS Grad Student Prize Committee.

Essays can be any of several formats:

Submitters must clearly indicate the format of the essay submitted.

Essays should have a minimum word count of 7,500 and a maximum word count of 14,000 (25 to 50 pages approximately) inclusive of footnotes and bibliography.

Essays should be submitted to the AAASS by the Chairs of the Regional Affiliates or the primary or secondary representatives of the Institutional Members. Graduate students whose institution is not an institutional member of the AAASS or is not holding a competition this year, are advised to check the rules for their regional competition.

Essays should be sent in electronic format, simultaneously to Jolanta Davis (jmdavis@fas.harvard.edu) and to all members of the prize committee:

Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2009. Winners will be decided by early September 2009.

2008 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner

The 2008 Graduate Student Essay Contest Prize was awarded to Colleen M. Moore for the essay “The Popular Response to War and Mobilization in Russia in 1914,” which also received the First Prize in the Graduate Paper Daniel Armstrong Memorial Essay Contest at Indiana University.

Past Winners of the Graduate Student Essay Prize

2007 - Emily Baran received the award for her essay "Communism or Armageddon? Representations of the Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Press, 1954-1985"