Robert F. Byrnes
Russian and East European Institute

Ani Abrahamyan (Slavic) received the Jerzy Kolodziej Excellence in Teaching Award for 2019-20. Administered by the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, the award recognizes an outstanding graduate student associate instructor each year. It honors Slavic professor emeritus Dr. Jerzy Kolodziej, (BA, SLAV, 1962; PhD, SLAV, 1984), who retired in 2009 after 30 years of teaching Russian and Polish languages at Indiana University, including over 20 years as director of the Summer Workshop in Slavic and Eastern European Languages.

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Filip Mitričević (History) has reviewed The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia by Zsófia Lóránd  (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018​) in the most recent issue of the newsletter of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, available here.

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Daniel Muck (Political Science) is a Fellow at IU's Ostrom Workshop in 2020-21.

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Gheorghe Pacurar (Religious Studies) is the recipient of a 2020 ASEEES Dissertation Research Grant in support of his work on “Incarnate Ecclesiology and the Making of Democratic Law in Interwar Romania.”

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Dafna Rachok (Anthropology) is a Fellow at IU's Ostrom Workshop in 2020-21.​

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Natasha Rubanova (Comparative Literature) delivered a talk in REEI’s Russian-language colloquium (О России по-русски/On Russia in Russian) under the title «Как пишется память в новейшей русской литературе:  Творчество Полины Барсковой и Марии Степановой» [Writing Memory in Contemporary Russian Literature: The Work of Polina Barskova and Mariia Stepanova] in October.

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Stepan Serdiukov (History) ​conducted an interview with Ivan Kurilla, Professor at the Political Sciences Department of the European University at Saint Petersburg, the text of which is now up on the Russian Studies Workshop's website. Their discussion focused on the challenges of research and teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruptive impact of COVID-19 on academic exchange between Russia and the US, and the reception in Russia of Black Lives Matter protests in the US.

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Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed (Slavic) has received the Neatrour-Edgerton Fellowship for Spring 2021. Administered by the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, the fellowship supports a semester of uninterrupted research for advanced graduate students. The fellowship honors the memory of Elizabeth (Betty Jo) Baylor Neatrour (1935-2002; PhD, SLAV, 1973) and her faculty mentor, Professor William B. Edgerton (1915-2004), who taught for many years in the department.

Congratulations, IU Students!!

Congratulations to Leah Valtin-Erwin, recipient of this year's ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Graduate Student Essay Prize. Entitled “A Bag for All Systems: Shopping Bags and Urban Grocery Shopping in Late Communist and Early Post-Communist Eastern Europe, 1980-2000,” Leah wrote her award-winning essay for Graduate Readings in History, taught by Maria Bucur, Professor of History and Gender Studies, in Spring 2019. The work was previously recognized with REEI’s Armstrong Graduate Essay Prize in 2019. A third-year PhD candidate in Eastern European History under the supervision of Bucur and Padraic Kenney, Professor of History, Leah holds a bachelor’s degree in East & Central European Studies from Hampshire College and a master’s degree in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation explores the expansion of foreign-owned supermarkets into Romania, Poland, and East Germany after 1989. Leah’s studies and research have been supported by grants from the Institute for European Studies, the Department of History, the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, and the Polish Studies Association. She has also been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Leah is President of the IU Romanian Studies Organization.

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Congratulations to Szabolcs László, winner of this year’s Mark Pittaway Prize for best scholarly article or book chapter in Hungarian Studies. Administered by the Hungarian Studies Association, the prize is named in memory of historian Mark Pittaway, who passed away in 2010. Szabolcs‘s prizewinning article, “Promoting the Kodály Method during the Cold War: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy and the Transnational Network of Music Educators in the 1960s and 1970s, appeared in Múltunk – Special Issue: Openness and Closedness. Culture and Science in Hungary and the Soviet Bloc after Helsinki (64 (2019): 107-140). In announcing the award, the selection committee wrote: “Based on his exploration of Hungarian archival sources and displaying a solid footing in the scholarship of the cultural Cold War, the author offers a multi-layered analysis, setting the formation of this long-lasting professional network against the Cold-War agenda of Hungarian cultural diplomacy that struggled to control it. László advances a pitch-perfect argument, highlighting the agency of American and Hungarian educators but also their exploitation by the Hungarian cultural authorities." In addition to receiving this honor, Szabolcs also published an article in the Slavic and East European Blog (an affiliate publication of the Slavic and East European Journal) about the 1959 televised lecture series on Russian history by the late Robert F. Byrnes, IU Professor of History, who founded REEI and served as its first director.

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