SRS awards three prizes: the annual Graduate Student Essay Prize, the biennial Book Award, and the biennial Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize. Please scroll down for the winners of the three prizes.
Call for Applications to the Fourteenth Annual Graduate Student Essay Prize
The Society for Romanian Studies (SRS) is pleased to announce the Fourteenth Annual Graduate Student Essay Prize competition for an outstanding unpublished essay or thesis chapter. The submitted single-author work must be written in English by a graduate student in any social science or humanities discipline on a Romanian or Moldovan subject, broadly and inclusively understood.
The 2022 prize consists of $250 plus an individual, one-year membership to SRS that includes a subscription to the journal, valued at $75. The second-place award of honorable mention includes a one-year subscription to the journal.
The competition is open to current MA and doctoral students or to those who defended dissertations in the academic year 2021–2022. The submitted work should have been completed within the last two academic years and should not have been published yet. If the essay is a dissertation chapter, it should be accompanied by the dissertation abstract and table of contents. Expanded versions of conference papers are also acceptable if accompanied by a description of the panel and the candidate’s conference paper proposal. Candidates should clearly indicate the format of the essay submitted. Essays/chapters should be up to 10,000 words double-spaced, including citations.
Candidates should clearly indicate their institutional affiliation. Include as well your current e-mail and postal addresses so that you may be contacted. Questions can be directed to the chair of the committee, Prof. Rodica Milena Zaharia, at milena.zaharia@rei.ase.ro. Please send a copy of the essay, any accompanying documentation (as both Word and PDF please) and an updated CV to milena.zaharia@rei.ase.ro.
Applicants are not required to be members of SRS in order to apply.
Deadline for submissions is 15 July 2022. The winners will be announced on 1 November 2022.
SRS Essay Prize Committee Members:
Rodica Milena Zaharia (chair), Faculty of International Business and Economics, Bucharest University of Economic Studies milena.zaharia@rei.ase.ro
Marius Wamsiedel, Department of Health and Environmental Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Marius.Wamsiedel@xjtlu.edu.cn
Iemima Ploscariu, Independent Scholar iemima.ploscariu2@mail.dcu.ie
Call for Applications to the Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize
The Society for Romanian Studies (SRS) is delighted to announce the inaugural competition for the Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize in any discipline related to Romanian Studies. The named prize will be awarded in honor of the late Professor Keith Hitchins, who served as an advisor, encouragement and inspiration for numerous graduate students throughout his long career. The award carries a financial component of $250 plus a year’s membership of the SRS, which includes a subscription to the Journal of Romanian Studies.
Eligibility: The submitted dissertation must be written in English or Romanian by a scholar in any social science or humanities discipline on a Romanian or Moldovan subject, broadly and inclusively understood. This may encompass focus on themes related to Romania (as it currently exists and in its various past iterations), to the people who have lived in or currently inhabit Romania, or those who self-identify as Romanian but reside beyond Romania’s borders. Studies connected to ethnic minorities in Romania are also eligible. If you are not sure whether your dissertation is eligible, please send a query to the chair of the jury.
We will take into consideration dissertations that were completed (technically speaking, “deposited” with the relevant institution) during the last two academic years, 2020-2021 and 2021-22. Dissertations completed prior to August 2020 are ineligible.
Materials and Deadline: To be considered for this competition, please send a brief letter of interest that includes the title of your dissertation, an abstract, and some proof of eligibility in regards to when your dissertation was completed. This proof may be as simple as an email or signed letter from your dissertation adviser, confirming the academic year when the dissertation was deposited. We need to receive the initial inquiry before June 9th, 2022, in order to ensure speedy reply. The letter of interest needs to be sent to the chair of the jury.
Please send the dissertation in a digital format that can be easily shared, as pdf or word document. The dissertation needs to be sent individually to each member of the jury. Documents that are very large may not come through. If you have illustrations that render the document very large, please contact us directly and we will work out a digital document transfer to the jury. The deadline for submitting the dissertation is July 1st, 2022.
The winner of the competition will be announced on or around November 1st, 2022.
The jury of the Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize is:
Maria Bucur, history and gender studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, Chair: mbucur@indiana.edu
Calin Cotoi, sociology, University of Bucharest: calincotoi@gmail.com
Radu Vancu, literature and literary criticism, Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu: rvancu@gmail.com
Winner: Roxana-Talida Roman, The Edge of Europe – Heritage, Landscape and Conflict Archaeology: First World War Material Culture in Romanian Conflictual Landscapes (Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2020).
Honorable Mentions: Péter Berta, Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), and Călin Cotoi, Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848–1914: Networks and Laboratories of Knowledge (Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2020).
2021 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Alexandra Ciocănel (University of Manchester)
Honorable Mention: Iemima Ploscariu (Dublin City University)
2020 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Cosmin Koszor Codrea (Oxford Brookes University)
Honorable Mention: Cosmin Tudor Minea (University of Birmingham)
Winner: Bruce O’Neill, The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017).
Honorable Mention: Irina Marin, Peasant Violence and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
2019 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Adela Hîncu (Central European University)
Honorable Mention: Elena Radu
2018 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Alexandra Chiriac (University of St. Andrews)
Honorable Mentions: Nicoleta Simonia Minciu, Iemima Ploscariu (Dublin City University), and Matthew Signer (Stanford University)
Winner: Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Honorable Mentions: Virginia Hill and Gabriela Alboiu, Verb Movement and Clause Structure in Old Romanian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Dennis Deletant, British Clandestine Activities in Romania During the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Ştefan Ionescu, Jewish Resistance to Romanianization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
2017 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Dana Mureşan
Special Mentions: Kathryn Grow Allen (University of Buffalo), Alin Rus (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Karin Steinbrueck (Northwestern University)
2016 Graduate Student Essay Prize
No prize awarded.
Winner: Sean Cotter, Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (Rochester, 2014).
Honorable Mention: Moshe Idel, Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (Peter Lang, 2013).
2015 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Matei Costinescu (University of Bucharest)
Honorable Mentions: Madalina Vereş (University of Pittsburgh) and Zsuzsanna Magdo (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
2014 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Roxana Cazan (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Winner: Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: the Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton University Press, 2011).
2013 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Florin Poenaru (Central European University)
2012 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Jonathan Stillo (City University of New York)
Winner: Tom Gallagher, Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong (Manchester University Press, 2009)
2011 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Cristina Onose (University of Toronto)
2010 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Anca Mandru (University of Illinois)
2009 Graduate Student Essay Prize
Winner: Roland Clark (University of Pittsburgh)