Copy
View this email in your browser
May 12, 2021

Dear Colleagues:

We write to you as Lifetime Members of AWSS to ask you to help support an exciting new funding opportunity for our PhD students: the AWSS Patricia Herlihy Graduate Research Prize. 

We’ve been astonished by the generosity of colleagues and friends who’ve contributed so far. We set out with the goal to raise $20,000 to permanently endow AWSS’s graduate research prize, and we are almost there, thanks to a large donation from the Herlihy family, and numerous donations from our colleagues, including several past presidents and many board members of AWSS.

The AWSS Herlihy Prize will provide a $1,000 award annually to a PhD student who works on any aspect of Russian, Slavic, and Eurasian studies to use for research towards their dissertation.

The prize honors the late historian Patricia Herlihy, who died in October 2018 at the age of 88, and was a beloved friend and colleague to many in our field. The author of four books and numerous book chapters and articles, Pat was best known for her elegant first book Odessa: A History, 1794-1914. Published in 1987, it was the first history of Odessa written in any language. Her book helped open up the study of the Black Sea for Russian imperial historians, and it remains a classic in the field. 

Pat entered the profession in the 1960s, and was a “first” in many ways: she was the first woman to receive a PhD from Penn in 1963, and also one of the first tenured women in the Brown University History Department, where she taught from 1986 until her retirement in 2005. She did not have an easy time establishing her academic career between the 1960s and 1980s. As a married woman, she was disqualified from jobs at institutions with strict policies of hiring only single women. She loved to teach and excelled at it; before finally getting a permanent position at Brown, she spent many years teaching adjunct courses and filling in for colleagues on sabbatical at various institutions, as she researched and wrote her first book. 

Pat never complained much about the obstacles and prejudices she faced as a woman and mother in academia. She was very good at plowing on and succeeding in spite of them, and she privately 
did a lot to help other women navigate the profession and succeed. Accordingly, Pat was one of the early recipients of the AWSS Outstanding Achievement Award, an award she was thrilled to receive.

Pat was an irreplaceable friend, a distinguished scholar, and a generous mentor to so many. We’re so excited to have the chance to pay tribute to her and her commitment to students and research every year, when we award the AWSS Herlihy Research Prize. We’ve just announced the call for applications for Fall 2021, and we plan to announce the first recipient at our AWSS reception at ASEEES in November. 

Will you kindly help us achieve our fundraising goal? We’re so close to it--and whatever amount you can afford will make a difference.

Donations may be made online, at www.awsshome.org/donate. There, you can click on “Herlihy Prize Fundraising,” and select “Herlihy Prize for Graduate Research” in the drop down menu.

With sincere thanks and best wishes,
 
         
Christine D. Worobec                                              Eileen Kane
Distinguished Research Professor Emerita       Associate Professor of History
Northern Illinois University                                  Connecticut College














 
Twitter
Facebook
Website
Copyright © 2021 Association for Women in Slavic Studies, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp