Cornell historian Cristina Florea has won the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize and received an honorable mention for the Wayne Vucinich Book Prize for her history of Bukovina, a region now divided between Romania and Ukraine.
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies will present the honors Nov. 14 at its annual convention in Chicago, according to Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Florea, an associate professor of history, wrote “Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland,” published by Princeton University Press in 2025. The book follows the region’s history over two centuries.
The Jelavich prize recognizes a monograph published during the previous year on Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 1600, or on 19th- and 20th-century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history. The Vucinich prize recognizes contributions to Russian, Eurasian and East European studies across disciplines.
Bukovina no longer appears as a region on maps. Florea’s book examines how the ambitions and conflicts of the Habsburg Empire, Romania and the Soviet Union shaped it.
The region has again become a place of geopolitical change, hosting people fleeing eastern Ukraine while retaining the effects of its Soviet past, according to Cornell’s account of the book.
Florea credited the prize committees, readers and people who helped her develop the project. She said researching the region required bringing together multiple perspectives on the same place that were often incompatible.
On sabbatical this fall, Florea is working on a history of Vienna during its four-power occupation from 1945 to 1955. That project draws on archives in Vienna, London and Paris, as well as the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
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