NASSS BOOK PRIZE (Formerly Mihajlo Miša Đorđević Book Prize*)

NASSS Book Prize is awarded annually to distinguished authors of books published in English on aspects of Serbian social and cultural history.  Nominations should be sent by May 31 of the current year to Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Chair (slobodanka.vladivglover@monash.edu). The committee, comprised of Rajka Gorup, Tomislav Longinović, and Ida Sinkević, will announce its decision by October 1 of the same year.

 *Mihajlo Misha Djordjevic was one of the founding members of NASSS. He was a professor of French literature at Penn State University and a translator of Serbian poetry into English. Until 2019, this award was given in his honor.

2022 NASSS Book Prize :

The 2022 NASSS Book Prize has been awarded to Svetlana Tomić for her book The Hidden History of New Women in Serbian Culture: Towards a New History of Literature (Lexington, 2022). This exceptional research monograph makes a significant contribution to Serbian literary history, offering a new perspective on Serbian culture which transcends the confines of the literary canon. Taking its cues from memory studies and gender theory, it brings important Serbian erudite women out of oblivion and offers them a place in a “new” history of literature. This new history is carried by a group the author designates as “new women,” Draga Gavrilović, novelist, Natalia Obrenović, Queen of Serbia, Milka Aleksić Gurgurova, actress, and Jelena Dimitrijević, world-traveler. Two men also garner a mention: Dragutin Ilić, literary critic and Uroš Predić, academic painter, famous for his national “genre portraits” such as Kosovka Devojka, as well as an illustrator for a little-known Serbian writer of children's books, Danica Bandić Telečki. Ilić, whose broad literary activities included a literary salon, has a special place in this pantheon of “new women” owing to his novel Roman Kraljice Natalije, based on his encounters with the tragic Serbian queen. The monograph contains an extensive bibliography and historic photographs of the women protagonists and their male supporters. The book is dedicated to yet another significant Serbian woman in the American diaspora, Ljubica D. Popovich, erstwhile editor of the journal Serbian Studies and President of NASSS.

PAST RECIPIENTS:

2019 — Biljana Obradović and Dubravka Đurić, Eds. Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry. Dialogos, 2016.
2018 — Jovana Babović, Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
2017 — Tatjana Aleksić, The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom, University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2013
2016 — Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Scholarship as the Art of Life: Contributions On Serbian Literature, Culture, And Society,
Slavica Publishers, 2016
2013 — Radmila Gorup, After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land. Stanford University Press, 2013
2012 — Tomislav Z. Longinović, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary. Duke University Press, 2012
2009 — Gregory A. Freeman, The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of
World War. New American Library 2007
2007 — Charles Simić, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.