Congratulations to Mirela Ivanova, winner of the 2025 ESSA Book Prize! An honorable mention goes to Tomas Grusiecki.
The winner of the 2025 ESSA Book Prize is Mirela Ivanova, Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing Between Rome and Constantinople (Oxford University Press, 2024). Mirela Ivanova’s Inventing Slavonic: Cultures of Writing between Rome and Constantinople is a field-defining and methodologically innovative study that reshapes our understanding of early Slavic literacy and the Cyrillo-Methodian mission. It demonstrates with exceptional philological and historical rigor that the Life of Constantine, Life of Methodios, and On Letters were not neutral accounts but strategic interventions in the political and ecclesiastical disputes of the ninth and tenth centuries. By dismantling long-standing nationalist narratives and placing these texts firmly within their Byzantine, Roman, Moravian, and early Bulgarian contexts, Ivanova offers a compelling reinterpretation of how Slavonic literacy was imagined, contested, and then institutionalized. Her interdisciplinary approach (drawing on literacy studies, memory theory, manuscript culture, and postcolonial perspectives) reveals how scripts and identities are continually “invented” in response to shifting political landscapes. Inventing Slavonic stands as a major contribution to Slavic and Byzantine studies, and is an outstanding candidate for this recognition.
The ‘Honorable Mention’ goes to Tomasz Grusiecki, Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania (Manchester University Press, 2023). Tomasz Grusiecki’s Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania presents an engaging and persuasive argument regarding the long-studied place of orientalism in the early modern art and material culture of the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth. Placing the region in its historical context, as an early modern union of diverse peoples and cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, the author asks how it was possible for foreign things to be perceived as local? In his search for answers, Grusiecki examines an impressive selection of “manifestations of national identity” or transcultural “things” that blur the division between foreign and native. He explicitly places his work against both historical and contemporary readings of the culture of Poland-Lithuania that are informed by geographical determinism, cultural essentialism, and nativism. Grusiecki has provided us with a compelling study of transcultural “things” that reveals the fluidity and heterogenous nature of culture and identity in Poland-Lithuania. In doing so, he forcefully pushes back against nationalist readings of its fascinating cultural history, promotes more inclusive readings of the past, and successfully repositions Poland-Lithuania in the study of global art history.
