Current Prize Contests:

Best Graduate Paper

At its annual November 2023 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 2020 or later.  Submissions 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.  

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 June 2023.  

Send entries to Edward Snajdr, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, John Jay College, CUNY, 524 West 59th Street, Room 9.63-19, New York, NY 10019, USA.  Address any questions to Dr. Snajdr at esnajdr@jjay.cuny.edu.

The SSA Awards Committee consists of Susan Mikula (Benedictine University, in Lisle, IL), M. Mark Stolarik (University of Ottawa, in Ottawa, Canada), Greg Ference (Salisbury University in Salisbury Maryland) and Edward Snajdr (City University of New York, in New York, NY).

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Recent Prizes Awarded:

2022 Best Book Prize Announcement

The winner of this year’s SSA Best Book Prize is Michael Cude with the submission (2022) The Slovak Question: A Transatlantic Perspective, 1914-1948 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). 

The decision of the prize committee was unanimous. Cude’s very well-researched and highly readable history makes a much-needed contribution to understanding the role of American Slovaks in shaping Slovak national identity and in promoting concepts of American democracy back in the homeland. Cude connects communities and political debates across continents and time periods to guide readers through this important story. The rich and diverse archival data used in writing this book was impressive and reveals the dynamics and the tension between the US government’s support of “Czechoslovakism” and the perspective and hopes of American Slovaks in the context of post-1918 Europe as well as the fate of this experiment within the currents of the inter-war period. 

The committee noted that all the submissions in this year’s competition were of very high quality. These included Felix Jeschke’s (2020) Iron Landscapes: National Space and the Railways in Interwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Berghahn Books); Juraj Buzalka’s (2020) The Cultural Economy of Protest in Post-Socialist European Union: Village Fascists and their Rivals (New York: Routledge), and Charles Sabatos’ (2020) Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). 

The prize committee consisted of Edward Snajdr (Chair), Susan Mikula, Greg Ference and Mark Stolarik. The committee commends and thanks all the scholars who submitted their work for the prize and wish them all the best in their continuing scholarly endeavors.

We congratulate Michael on winning this year’s prize!

Ed Snajdr–Chair, SSA Prize Committee

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2021 Best Article in Slovak Studies Announcement

Report from the Prize Committee: Edward Snajdr (Chair), Susan Mikula, Greg Ference and Mark Stolarik

The winner of this year’s SSA Best Article/Book Chapter Prize is Marty Manor Mullins with the submission, “Forgotten Velvet: Understanding Eastern Slovakia’s 1989“ in New Perspectives, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Central and East European Politics and International Relations, vol. 27, no. 3, 2019.  

The decision of the prize committee was unanimous. Mullins’ well-researched and elegantly written article focused on an important and overlooked regional center, challenging the notion that people throughout Slovakia followed leaders of the Velvet Revolution in Bratislava. Drawing on interviews with activists, media sources and research in local VPN archives, Mullins shows how Eastern Slovaks, particularly in Košice, were motivated more by anti-communist ideology than by economics in rising up against the regime. She also explains how, partly in rivalry with Bratislava, Košice activists supported Prague’s protest organizations during the revolution, but also emerged as a distinctive movement that included ethnic minorities and struggled to include many reluctant steelworks in the cause. With pertinent photographs of many of the activists involved, this article is a substantive contribution to understanding the events that occurred in Eastern Slovakia in 1989, presenting a clearer picture of the diversity of Slovakia’s experience during the collapse of communism. 

All the submissions in this year’s competition were of high quality and addressed interesting and engaging topics that reflect the richness of current scholarship on Slovakia. These included Stanley Kirschbaum’s “Sister Margit Slachta of Hungary and the deportation of Slovak Jews,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 61, no. 1, 2019; Juraj Buzalka’s “Post-peasant Memories: Populist or Communist Nostalgia,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, vol. 32, no. 4, 2018; James Krapfl’s “From the Socialist Revolution of 1989 to the ‘Real’ Revolution of 1990,” in From Revolution to Uncertainty, von Puttkamer, Borodziej and Holubec (eds.), Routledge, 2020; James Krapfl and Kieran Williams’ “For a Civic Socialism and the Rule of law,” in Eastern Europe in 1968, McDermott and Stibbe (eds.), Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018; and James Krapfl and Andrew Kloiber’s “The Revolution Continues:  Memories of 1989” published in the online journal Cultures of History Forum. 

The prize committee consisted of Edward Snajdr (Chair), Susan Mikula, Greg Ference and Mark Stolarik. The committee commends and thanks all the scholars who submitted their work for the prize and wish them all the best in their continuing scholarly endeavors.

We congratulate Marty on winning this year’s prize!

Ed Snajdr–Chair, SSA Prize Committee

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2018 Article/Book Chapter Prize Winner

The winner of the 2018 SSA Article/ Book Chapter Prize is Jonathan L. Larson. His submission, “Wild Eavesdropping: Observations on Surveillance, Conspiracy, and Truth in East Central Europe” appeared in Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), vol. 40, no. 2, 2017.

In his study, Larson looks at the phenomena of surveillance and eavesdropping in certain states of East Central Europe, including in Slovakia. He finds that, unlike in the Western world, where people would be outraged at the use and release of secret tape-recordings as a violation of their privacy, the people of East Central Europe do not mind such behavior, because it reveals the true thoughts/feelings of politicians, who are suspect in the eyes of the general public. His analysis astutely links security and surveillance to the legacies of state socialism but also to emerging technologies and the complicated processes of post-socialist democratization. While Slovakia is one of several cases that Larson examines, he ties in all his evidence and demonstrates the importance of developments in Slovakia as not only indicative but even emblematic of broader social and political developments in the region. Moreover, both Larson’s thesis and his data are comprehensively contextualized in the theoretical literature of the anthropology of post-socialism and its larger relevance to the contemporary global condition.

Larson’s article link is: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/plar.12224
However, that link may require a university subscription. You may also request a copy through Researchgate

Other 2018 submissions:

Philip J. Howe, Thomas A. Lorman and Daniel E. Miller’s “The Creation of the Conditions for Consociational Democracy and Its Development in Interwar Czechoslovakia.” 2016. Bohemia 56, 2, pp. 362-380.

Stanley Kirschbaum, 2015. “Monasticism in Slovakia and Slovak National Development,” in Monasticism in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics, Ines Angeli Murzaku (Ed.), London: Routledge. pp. 62-85.

All three submissions, in their own distinctive ways, point to the importance and the value of sophisticated interpretations and analyses of Slovakia’s role in the larger cultural, political and historical currents in regional and global contexts. The committee commends all of the scholars who submitted their work for the prize and wish them all the best in their continuing scholarly endeavors. We congratulate Jonathan on winning this year’s prize!

Treasurer’s note from Carol Leff: In a historical first, the treasurer presented the prize check to the winner in person and took him out to dinner. If you come to Champaign-Urbana to get your prize check, she will do the same for you!