Prize Watch: Lynne Viola wins the SSHRC prize (among others)

Lynne Viola

From the Toronto Star, I recently learned of the remarkable career of University of Toronto historian Lynne Viola, who a few months ago received the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's Gold Medal. Viola is a student of the history of Russia, not Canada, so rather outside the usual parameters here. But it is impressive to learn of a historian working in Canada who is described as “quite simply the single greatest living authority in the world on collectivization and the Soviet peasantry, and a leading scholar on Stalinism more generally.”

She's been doing well on the prize front too. She has previously won the Molson Prize and the Killam Prize, making her only the fifth scholar to win both of these and the SSHRC Gold Medal.

As the Star article by Christine Sismondo notes, Viola works in a field in danger of extinction. Her work on the Gulag and Stalinist-era repression draws on Russian archives that were opened up by the fall of Stalinism and are now being closed by the rise of Putinism.  Recently she had been making good use of Soviet-era archives that remain available ... in Ukraine.