Christine Worobec
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) will present Christine D. Worobec, Board of Trustees and distinguished research professor emerita at Northern Illinois University, with the Distinguished Contributions Award at its annual conference Nov. 9-12, in Chicago, IL.
The Distinguished Contributions Award is ASEEES’ highest honor, recognizing individuals with an exemplary record of sustained achievement in the field through scholarship, training and service to the profession. For her tireless work mentoring scholars, and in promoting Russian and Ukrainian women’s history, family history and rural history, Worobec has been selected as the recipient of the 2017 ASEEES Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award.
Professor Worobec is a renowned historian and prolific author. Worobec’s research emphasizes the everyday lives of peasants and ordinary women in Russia and Ukraine, which is especially commendable in a field long dominated by scholarship on the intelligentsia and the political elites. She has written numerous path-breaking books and articles, especially her monographs Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton University Press), which won the Association of Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Heldt Prize for the Best Book by a Woman in 1991, and Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press), which won the Heldt Prize for the Best Book in Women’s Studies a decade later. Worobec has also collaborated on significant reference works and essay collections. Currently, she is working on mapping and analyzing Orthodox pilgrimages in modern Ukraine and Russia.
Worobec, who earned her B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Toronto, has garnered numerous accolades, among them grants from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, the Institute for Advanced Studies of Paris, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Worobec has generously served her profession. As a member of the AAASS/ASEEES since 1985, she has held leadership roles on its Board of Directors and various committees. Worobec has also advanced the position of women and women’s studies in academe as a long-time leader of the AWSS. She has served on the editorial boards of several journals and refereed seventeen additional journals. Worobec has advised countless organizations and administrative committees. Fabled for her intellectual generosity and personal warmth, she has devoted a significant part of her career to advancing the status of women in the field, both in the U.S. and abroad. Finally, Worobec’s nearly twenty years as editor of the Russian Studies Series at Northern Illinois University Press is noteworthy. Under her direction, this series has published an astonishing number of significant scholarly books and enabled many junior scholars to establish themselves in a challenging publishing environment.
