2021 Citation Recipient

Andriy Zayarnyuk

The Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies, established in 2019 and sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, recognizes a distinguished book in the field of Ukrainian studies that was published in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Andriy Zayarnyuk
Title: L’viv’s Uncertain Destination: A City and Its Train Terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev (University of Toronto Press).

The Pritsak Book Prize committee commends Andriy Zayarnyuk, author of L’viv’s Uncertain Destination: A City and Its Train Terminal from Franz Joseph I to Brezhnev, winner of the 2021 prize. Zayarnyuk’s stellar monograph offers a new spatial history of the urban space of L’viv by using the railway station as a transnational point of transfer, encounter, and entry into Ukraine’s inhabited worlds. The book features careful archival work and analysis of periodical literature and incorporates historiography in multiple languages and across fields of urban history, anthropology, labor history, and human geography. Zayarnyuk’s narrative leads us to rethink how the late imperial Habsburg and Romanov, Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet, interwar Polish, and Nazi German regimes produced, structured, and controlled urban space. Focusing on railway workers, the book also draws attention to the history of Lviv’s wage earners, who constituted the majority of the city’s adult population. Zayarnyuk ambitiously challenges the paradigm of a singular modernity, in Europe or elsewhere. He takes us on a trans-imperial tour of violence and resistance, the built infrastructural spaces of his home city, and the many language universes of Ukraine across several centuries.

Honorable Mention: Oleksandra Wallo
Title: Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary: From the Collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan (University of Toronto Press).

Oleksandra Wallo’s scholarly monograph Ukrainian Women Writers and the National Imaginary has been awarded Honorable Mention by the 2021 Pritzak Prize. The committee commends Wallo for her well-conceived, well-researched, and well-written volume that examines how major Ukrainian women writers—Oksana Zabuzhko, Maria Matios, and Evhenia Kononenko—have gained prominence by inclining their writing toward a national imaginary.

Honorable Mention: Jessica Zychowicz
Title: Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First- Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press).

The Pritsak Prize committee is pleased to award an Honorable Mention to Jessica Zychowicz for her timely monograph, Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine. Zychowicz offers us an ambitious transdisciplinary study that engages art, visual culture, feminism, and political activism with equal verve. Using archival research, fieldwork methodologies, sophisticated analyses of digital media, and personal reflection, Zychowicz analyzes the role of art and artist collectives in driving change during the recent mass protests on Kyiv’s main square with great imagination and originality.