Patricia K.Grimsted after the awards ceremony at the AAASS Convention in Pittsburgh flanked by (left to right): Halyna Hryn, HURI Research Associate and Director of the Ukrainian Summer Institute; Tymish Holowinsky, Executive Director of HURI; and Jaap Kloosterman, Director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (on the right).

Dr. Grimsted Receives AAASS Highest Honor

November 24, 2002

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Senior Research Associate at HURI was presented with the Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies at its annual convention in Pittsburgh on November 24, 2002. This is the highest honor the Association confers. The Award is testimony to the wide recognition Dr. Grimsted enjoys among her peers in academe for her published directories and other writings about the vast archival holdings in the former Soviet Union and post- Soviet Ukraine and Russia, as well as other European countries over
the past four decades.

From the AAASS press release:

"Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and an Honorary Fellow at Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History, is the preeminent expert on Soviet and post-Soviet archives. Born in the United States, she completed her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in history at the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at the American University, the University of Maryland, and Bucknell University, and has lectured extensively. During her illustrious career Grimsted has won millions of dollars in grants and fellowships from prestigious agencies and foundations.
After the publication of her first monograph, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801-1825, published by University of California Press in 1969, she concentrated on the description and analysis of Soviet archives. Her Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad, published by Princeton University Press in 1972, and successive volumes introduced generations of scholars to Soviet and post-Soviet archives and manuscript collections.
Grimsted's path-breaking publications laid a cornerstone for English- language scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union. Basically, everyone in the field relied on her fundamental work. In addition to annotated research guides to Eurasian archives, she has also written hundreds of scholarly articles and monographs that integrated theoretical issues and political matters into a well-argued historical context. Her writings are richly multi- faceted: one reviewer of Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution, published by HURI in 2001, said that not only is it 'a work of mature scholarship, but it also is an intellectual thriller and a tour de force.' Pat, we are all your students and we cannot even measure the depth of our intellectual debt to you. We bestow this award upon you with great enthusiasm."