Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

• 1. Introduction

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  The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies began not with a grand founding ceremony, but with a legal fiction. In 1948, a scholarly journal needed an owner on paper so it could legally print in the State of New York. A corporation was formed, given the name American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and tucked away as a "legal umbrella" behind the journal that created it. That quiet administrative act is still considered the organization's official date of establishment.

  What lay behind it was anything but quiet. The end of World War II had rearranged the map of Europe in ways that alarmed policy circles across the non-communist world. Governments needed analysts. Foreign services needed linguists. Universities scrambled to stand up programs that barely existed a decade before. Out of that scramble came the scholars, the journals, the committees, and eventually the organization now known as ASEEES.

  This is the story of how a postwar intelligence need became a professional home for thousands of academics studying Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. And it raises a question worth sitting with: what does it mean for a scholarly society to be outlawed by the government of the country it most closely studies?

• 2. Cold War Origins

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  Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Columbia University in New York City, and the University of Washington in Seattle were among the first American universities to build serious area studies programs after the war. The Soviet Union now controlled or heavily influenced a string of Central and Eastern European nations, and political decision-makers in Washington and beyond wanted rigorous academic analysis of Soviet politics, history, and culture. They also wanted a new generation of foreign affairs specialists trained in Russian and other regional languages.

  Those three institutions proved decisive. The scholars they trained and the professors who taught there became the leading figures in North American Slavic studies. Graduates and faculty from these programs were the people who would push for a national professional organization to bring the field together.

  Two existing bodies were already doing related work. The Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, a joint project of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, sponsored conferences and publications, handed out research grants and fellowships, and ran bibliographic projects. In 1938, the JCSS established a subcommittee specifically focused on Russian studies, with the explicit goal of producing a proposal for a national professional organization. That subcommittee would eventually find its partner in a journal.

• 3. A Journal Becomes an Institution

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  John Hazard of Columbia University launched the American Slavic and East European Review in 1941. By the time the postwar reorganization of the field began in earnest, that journal had already incorporated as the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Inc. The incorporation had a narrow purpose: to satisfy New York State printing law. But the name and the legal structure it created became the vessel into which everything else would eventually be poured.

  The full-fledged national membership organization launched on the 1st of June, 1960, under that same AAASS name. It merged the activities of the Russian Studies subcommittee and the journal's organization into a single body. The ASEER journal was enlarged, revised, and renamed to become the AAASS's own official quarterly peer-reviewed publication: Slavic Review. Professor Donald Treadgold of the University of Washington took on the role of its first editor.

  From its earliest days, the AAASS carried an interdisciplinary mandate. It was not built for any single academic department. Its stated purposes were practical and collegial: distribute an annual bibliography, sponsor professional meetings, publish a newsletter to keep members informed about ongoing research, and run other projects that would help the field as a whole. The annual bibliography and the newsletter were the connective tissue that held a geographically dispersed community of scholars together across the country.

• 4. Conventions and Community

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  The first AAASS convention took place in New York City in April 1964, under the chairmanship of Professor Holland Hunter of Haverford College. The organization did not leap straight to annual gatherings. In those early years, conventions were held every third year, a deliberate choice to avoid draining the energy of a still-young organization. The shift to annual conventions came later, and today the gathering moves to a different city each year.

  Over 2,000 people now attend on average. Regional affiliates sponsor panels and hold their own meetings within the main convention, folding six distinct geographic communities of scholars into a single national event. Those affiliates include the Central Slavic Conference, the Midwest Slavic Conference, the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, the Southwest Slavic Association, the Western Association for Slavic Studies, and the Northeast Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Conference.

  The convention is also where the association hands out its prizes. The list is long and specific: the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize awarded only in even-numbered years, the Tucker/Cohen Dissertation Prize for graduate students, and several others covering history, literary and cultural studies, Polish studies, and political and social studies. Each prize carries the name of a scholar or benefactor, threading the organization's history into its present.

• 5. Becoming ASEEES

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  In 2008, the membership voted to change the name. The new name, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, took effect in 2010. The shift was not cosmetic. It reflected a genuine broadening of the field's scope at a moment when many former Slavic and Russian studies centers across universities were renaming themselves Centers for Eurasian Studies. The old name's emphasis on Slavic studies no longer captured what the organization actually covered.

  The name change coincided with a physical move. The association's headquarters relocated from Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The national office at Pittsburgh handles membership administration, publication subscriptions, the NewsNet newsletter, and the logistics of the annual convention.

  Slavic Review, the journal that traces its lineage directly back to the 1941 ASEER, remains the association's flagship publication. Its editorial offices are at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The journal covers all academic disciplines across Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and its full archive is accessible through JSTOR. NewsNet, the organization's newsletter, comes out five times a year and carries news of both the profession and the association itself.

• 6. Outlawed in Russia

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  In June 2025, Russia's Prosecutor-General designated ASEEES an "undesirable" organization, effectively outlawing it within Russian territory. The designation placed the association in a category typically reserved for groups that Russian authorities regard as threats to state security or the constitutional order.

  The move came from the government of the country that sits at the center of the field ASEEES was built to study. The organization whose legal origins trace to a journal's need to print in New York State now carries a formal prohibition in Moscow. For scholars working in Russia or maintaining academic connections there, the designation carries real professional and legal risk.

  ASEEES currently has approximately 3,000 members and subscribers in the United States and abroad, and over fifty institutions hold membership through the Council of Institutional Members. The organization built around postwar anxieties about the Soviet sphere now operates under a different kind of pressure from the successor state to that same sphere.