GSA ANNOUNCES 2009 DAAD/GSA BOOK AND ARTICLE WINNERS

The Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst and the German Studies Association are pleased to announce this year’s prize recipients, who were recognized at the GSA’s thirty-third annual banquet in Arlington, Virginia, on 9 October.  They are Professor Despina Stratigakos and Professor Mila Ganeva. 

    The 2009 GSA/DAAD prize for the best book of the last two years in the fields of history or social sciences was awarded to Professor Despina Stratigakos for her book A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). The Prize Committee members were Professors Richard Bessel (University of York, chair), Ann Goldberg (University of California, Riverside), and Meredith Heiser-Duron (Foothill College and Stanford University).  In announcing its decision, the committee had this to say about Professor Stratigakos’s book:    

"When discussing the criteria for this year’s DAAD/GSA Book Prize, the members of the jury . . . agreed that the winning entry should display excellent research, be important to the development of German studies, and be well written and accessible to the general reader.  The book prize jury found their task simultaneously difficult and pleasurable -- a reflection of the high quality of the books submitted - and wished that there were more prizes to offer. . . .
    
"Our choice for the prize itself, A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2008) by Despina Stratigakos, more than met the criteria we set.  A Women's Berlin is a highly original and beautifully written book -- a book that enlightens, surprises, entertains, and changes the way we think about its subject.  By examining how, through the built environment, women architects, designers, patrons of the arts and social reformers “remapped Berlin as the birthplace of a new female subject,” Stratigakos offers a new perspective on Berlin in the Wilhelmine era.

"A Women’s Berlin focuses on women's housing cooperatives, social clubs, buildings for political and social welfare organizations -- the urban spaces that both reflected and helped to produce an emerging emancipated woman at the turn of the last century, functional spaces that served the professional, social, and intellectual needs of this new woman.  Their architecture also formed, in Stratigakos' reading, a kind of symbolic coded language that challenged prevailing norms of proper, domestic femininity.  Indeed, one of the surprises of the work is how radical and bold these building projects were.  For a long time, the German women’s movement was considered conservative, timid, excessively focused on 'spiritual motherhood' rather than the cause of equal rights.  Stratigakos' book shows something quite different, and does so with a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the fluid and dynamic ways that these women positioned themselves vis-à-vis the dominant society, on the one hand, and the question of women's “difference,” on the other.

"What sets this book apart is not simply the new insights it offers about the history of the German capital, Wilhelmine society and culture in the broad sense, and the lives of German women and how they shaped their environment in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Berlin and Germany.  It also is transnational in scope, and stretches across disciplinary boundaries.  This is a book that merits a home in German studies courses, courses on Berlin and on the development of the modern city more generally, as well as on nineteenth and twentieth century German history, in women’s studies classes and in those which focus on the history of architecture and of the built environment.  A Woman's Berlin impressed the jury with its meticulous research, its intelligent use of visual material, its pathbreaking content, its elegant argumentation, and its multidisciplinary methodology.  And it is a joy to read.  It represents the best in German studies, and is a book that the GSA can be proud to honor with its DAAD Book Prize for 2009."


    The article prize for 2009 was awarded for the best article in Germanistik or culture studies that appeared in the German Studies Review in 2007-08.  The prize this year was presented to Professor Mila Ganeva (Miami University) for her article “Weimar Film as Fashion Show:  Konfektionskomödien or Fashion Farces from Lubitsch to the End of the Silent Era,” which appeared in German Studies Review 30, no. 2 (May 2007): 288-310.  The Article Prize Committee included Professors Michael Jennings (Princeton University, chair), Petra Fachinger (Queens University), and Nicholas Vazsonyi (University of South Carolina).  In its laudatio, the committee stated:

"The committee unanimously agreed that Mila Ganeva’s article on “Weimar Film as Fashion Show” was an original and brilliantly written contribution to German Studies. Ganeva’s piece is an exemplary demonstration of the ways in which film can be read as a text to reveal both explicit and implicit aspects of the social context from which it emerges. Fashion, in Ganeva’s reading, serves a two-fold function in the films she analyzes: both as the epitome of a commodifying modernity that seeks to mold mass behavior through bald product placement, and at the same time, as a reflection of the disjunctive and fragmented effects that modernity has on the individual consumer."

    The GSA is grateful to the members of the prize committees for their excellent work, and it congratulates Professors Stratigakos and Ganeva for their outstanding achievements.