During the 2002 National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Pittsburgh, PA, Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, an honorary fellow of the IISH, received the AAASS Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies Award, the highest honour bestowed by the association. Maurice Friedberg and Andrzej Korbinski were the other recipients.
From the AAASS press release:
"Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and an Honorary Fellow at Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History, is the preeminent expert on Soviet and post-Soviet archives. Born in the United States, she completed her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in history at the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at the American University, the University of Maryland, and Bucknell University, and has lectured extensively. During her illustrious career Grimsted has won millions of dollars in grants and fellowships from prestigious agencies and foundations.
After the publication of her first monograph, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801-1825, published by University of California Press in 1969, she concentrated on the description and analysis of Soviet archives. Her Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad, published by Princeton University Press in 1972, and successive volumes introduced generations of scholars to Soviet and post-Soviet archives and manuscript collections.
Grimsted's path-breaking publications laid a cornerstone for English- language scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union. Basically, everyone in the field relied on her fundamental work. In addition to annotated research guides to Eurasian archives, she has also written hundreds of scholarly articles and monographs that integrated theoretical issues and political matters into a well-argued historical context. Her writings are richly multi- faceted: one reviewer of Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution, published by HURI in 2001, said that not only is it 'a work of mature scholarship, but it also is an intellectual thriller and a tour de force.'
Pat, we are all your students and we cannot even measure the depth of our intellectual debt to you. We bestow this award upon you with great enthusiasm."