The Slavonic Section are delighted to congratulate Simon Franklin on his newest book, The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), being awarded the prestigious University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. This prize is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies in the previous calendar year.
'Franklin has written an important book, one that inspires readers to reevaluate past assumptions about the history of material texts, categories of writing and the institutions that determine their value. His is a work whose implications extend beyond the chronological and geographical indicators of its title and that has the potential to establish a new branch of literary and cultural studies beyond the boundaries of our field.' USC Book Prize 2020
The full citation for the prize can be found here: https://www.aseees.org/programs/aseees-prizes/usc-book-prize-literary-and-cultural-studies/2020-usc-book-prize.
The Russian Graphosphere was also awarded an Honorary Mention for the prestigious historical Mark Raev Prize. The prize is awarded annually by the 18th Century Russian Study Group to a researcher whose book makes a special contribution to the study of the "Long Russian 18th Century." This is a particularly high honour for a scholar whose primary field of research is not the 18th Century.
"This book spans an enormous range of subjects related to the written word, the technologies to produce it, and the media to disseminate it. Spanning some 400 years of Russian history and culture, in which the long eighteenth century is central, it deals with belles-lettres, church and bureaucratic writings, legal documents, passports, inscriptions, other texts, and objects ranging from goblets and banners to cannons and clocks. The author discusses the production of the written word in public and domestic spaces, the role of church and state in this production, and the shifting hierarchies between manuscript and print. This original and imaginative work displays scrupulous scholarship and great erudition, and will be a lasting landmark in the scholarship on pre-revolutionary Russia.” Mark Raev Prize 2020
