Eleonory Gilburd, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, has been selected to receive the 2020 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies. The award is given out by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame and comes with a $10,000 prize.
The award honors “the best book in European studies that transcends a focus on any one country, state or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole.” This year’s cycle of the award considered humanities books published in 2017 or 2018.
Dr. Gilburd was honored for her book To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Belnap Press, 2018). The prise jury stated that the book is “a masterly and engrossing performance, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture reveals just how ambiguous the Soviet Russian relationship was with Western people and art. In her remarkable and stunningly comprehensive work of scholarship, Eleonory Gilburd has the pulse of the people at her fingertips as she deftly counterpoints the ‘thaw’ of the 1930s with those of the 1950s and ’60s.”
Dr. Gilburd is a graduate of the University of Chicago. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.