Outstanding Achievement Award
Outstanding Achievement Award 2017
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies is pleased to announce that Professor Natalia L'vovna Pushkareva is the winner of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award. Professor Pushkareva is the head of the Department of Gender and Ethnic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences and has been a leader in the modern Russian women's movement, as well as a prominent contributor to scholarship on women in Russian history.
A pioneer of women's and gender studies in the Soviet Union and Russia, Professor Pushkareva has produced an impressive list of publications. Beginning her career in the 1980s, she overcame resistance to women's and gender history through careful research that underpinned publications taken seriously by scholars outside of the Soviet Union. Based on her dissertation, her book Women of Ancient Rus (1989) constituted the first book in Soviet historiography on the history of medieval women in Russia. She has since written over 500 publications, including 15 books. Her articles in academic journals and popular magazines reach both scholarly and broadly public audiences. Pushkareva's book Women in Russian History: from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (M.E. Sharpe, 1997) won the 1999 Heldt Prize and continues to be an important classroom text and a source for others' work in the field. She also participated in a major bibliography project that had a significant impact on scholarship in Russia and abroad. Overall, as one supporter put it, her oeuvre "is awe-inspiring in its breadth. She has published authoritative works on Russian women's history in both the premodern and modern periods; works on ethnology relating to women's customary roles, practices, and images; works on gender theory; and works on research methodology in both history and ethnology."
Professor Pushkareva has also made an impact as the creator of institutional structures for women researchers in the field. Not only has she worked diligently to establish and direct the department of gender and ethnic studies at the Academy of Sciences, she helped to found the Russian Association of Researchers in Women's History (RAIZhI), of which she is currently the president. This organization is critical to the promotion of Russian women's history, scholarly interaction among historians in Russia, and dialogue between Russian scholars and their counterparts in other parts of the world. Much of this work occurs at annual conferences held in Russia. Pushkareva also uses her wide personal connections to team up Russian scholars with their colleagues abroad, work that has borne fruit in the publication of edited collections that bring Russian scholarship to a broader academic audience.
Equally important is Professor Pushkareva's role as teacher, mentor, and colleague. She has taught many students who have since gone on to become leading researchers in gender and women's history across Russia, including Anna Belova (Tver'), Natalia Novikova (Yaroslavl'), Zinara Mukhina (Staryi Oskol), Rima Suleimanova (Ufa), and Natalia Mitsiuk (Smolensk). She has overseen 31 dissertations, currently supervises an additional 10 students, and has mentored many Russian and foreign scholars in a wide range of fields. From her earliest graduate school days, she has taken a collaborative approach to conversations with colleagues, seeking to share information and learn from one another. Given the political upheavals that her generation has experienced, not to mention the fraught international relationships between Russia and other nations, her warm, open attitude to colleagues and students alike is remarkable.
In recognition of these outstanding achievements, AWSS is delighted to present Professor Pushkareva with this award.
For a list of past recipients click here.