Cristina Florea, associate professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, won two awards from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for her book “Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland” (Princeton University Press, 2025).
The first honor, the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, recognizes a distinguished monograph published the previous year on any aspect of Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 1600 or 19th and 20th century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history.
Flores also received honorable mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, awarded by ASEEES for important contributions to Russian, Eurasian and East European studies in any discipline. The prizes will be presented at the ASEEES annual convention in Chicago Nov. 14.
In her book, Florea tells a 200-year history of Bukovina, an eastern European region now divided between Romania and Ukraine and no longer marked on maps. Often associated with natural beauty, the region was shaped by ambitions of and conflicts between the Habsburg Empire, Romania and the Soviet Union. And it’s once again at the center of geopolitical realignment today, home to refugees fleeing eastern Ukraine and shaped by the afterlife of the Soviet Union.
“I am deeply grateful to the prize committees and to the book’s generous readers,” Florea said. “They say it takes a village to raise a child; it certainly took one to write this book. The many people who helped me with this project over the years deserve to share in this recognition.
“I hope the book will bring attention to Bukovina, a region that remains largely overlooked but whose story is truly extraordinary. Researching and writing it taught me a great deal about the challenge of bringing together multiple, often mutually incompatible, perspectives on the same place.”
On sabbatical this fall, Florea is at work on her next book, a history of Vienna under four-power occupation, 1945-1955, drawing on archives in Vienna, London, Paris and the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md.
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