*** Call for Papers: 2025 Sonja Luehrmann Article Prize ***
Soyuz: The Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies is accepting submissions for the 2025 Sonja Luehrmann Article Prize for the best published peer-reviewed article related to the culture, history, or politics of (post)socialism, broadly defined. Although we encourage submissions that contribute to the advancement and nuancing of contemporary scholarly understandings of (post)socialism, (post)communism, and decolonization, submitted entries may be on any topic that falls within the broad scope of interest represented by Soyuz.
First peer-reviewed articles or book chapters published in English in 2023 or 2024 by graduate students and untenured faculty within 10 years of earning their doctoral degree are eligible for consideration. Scholars from any discipline with any geographic area of interest are encouraged to apply.
A total of $500 will be awarded as cash prizes, presented to the winner and any candidates selected for honorable mentions. The winner of the 2025 prize will be encouraged to serve on the committee adjudicating the next year’s prize.
If warranted, an honorable mention may be named.
Submissions should be sent electronically to soyuz.interest.group@gmail.com no later than September 15, 2025 by midnight. Please include “Soyuz Article Prize” in the subject line.
***
Previous Winners and Honorable Mentions:
2018
The winner was Dr. Lilia Topouzova for her article “Re-inventing Socialist Eastern Europe: Gendered Representations of the Communist Experience in Post-Communist Cinema,” published in Gender & History in July 2018.
Honorable mentions went to:
— Dr. Tamta Khalvashi for the article “The Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia,” published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) in 2018
— Dr. Ivan Rajković for “For an Anthropology of the Demoralized: State Pay, Mock-Labour, and Unfreedom in a Serbian Firm,” which appeared in JRAI in 2017.
2017
The winner was Dr. Madgalena E. Stawkowski for her article “‘I Am a Radioactive Mutant:’ Emergent Biological Subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site,” which appeared in American Ethnologist: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12269/abstract
Honorable mentions went to:
— Dr. Lily Chumley, for “Seeing Strange: Chinese Aesthetics in a Foreign World,” published in Anthropological Quarterly: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613675/pdf
— Dr. Emily Channell-Justice, for “‘We’re Not Just Sandwiches:’ Europe, Nation, and Feminist (Im)Possibilities on Ukraine’s Maidan,” which appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/689639
2016
The inaugural article prize was awarded to Dr. Inna Leykin for “Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post Soviet Russia,” which appeared in Ethos: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/etho.12078/abstract
Receiving honorable mentions were: