Current Prize Contests:

2025 Best Article or Book Chapter

Winner of the 2025 Slovak Studies Association prize for Best Article or Book Chapter was Veronika Szeghy-Gayer for her article, Former Hungarian civil servants on the territory of Slovakia amid the first years of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1919-24: a case study on the status regulation of teachers and postal employees. European Review of History, 31(5):739-758. (2024)

Honorable mention went to Martin Pácha‘s Between Repression, Chaos and Uncertainty: Religious Minorities in Early Communist Czechoslovakia. Contemporary European History, 1-17. (2025)

See the Slovak Studies Association’s news post on 3 January 2026, for full details and links to all five submissions demonstrating the importance of the Slovak experience to the diverse fields of political science, history and cultural studies.

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2026 Best Graduate Paper: Call for Submissions

At its annual November 2026 meeting, during the ASEEES conference, the Slovak Studies Association will award a prize for the best graduate student paper in the humanities and social sciences about Slovakia presented in 2023 or later.  Submissions for this prize must be in English, but the conferences where the papers were presented may have taken place outside the English-speaking world.  The authors are to be members in good standing of the SSA and must have been graduate students at the time they delivered the papers. 

Membership for graduate students is free and information is available at slovakstudies.org/membership.  Submissions may be either in hard copy or electronic form, and the review committee will not return any submitted items. The deadline for postmarking submissions is 1 May 2026. 

Send hard copy entries to Edward Snajdr, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, John Jay College, CUNY, 524 West 59th Street, Room 9.63-22, New York, NY 10019, USA.  Send electronic entries to esnajdr@jjay.cuny.edu.

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2027 Best Book

Call for submissions for the 2027 Best Book prize will be announced early in 2027.

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SSA Lifetime Achievement Award

Beginning in 2024, the Slovak Studies Association annually may present a deceased or living SSA member with the Slovak Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Any member may nominate an individual for the award by presenting a brief rationale explaining the nominee’s eligibility at least one month before the annual SSA meeting. The SSA Executive Committee (the president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and newsletter editor) evaluate the nomination.  Approval requires a majority of all members attending the annual meeting. The SSA shall present those receiving an SSA Lifetime Achievement Award with a plaque and shall update our website with the names of the winners.  Please use this Google Form to nominate an individual. For more information, contact slovakstudies@gmail.com.