It is with great pleasure that we announce our prize winners for the academic year 2024-25: Mariya Kiprovska, Ahmet Demirel, Okan Kozanoğlu and Botond Rudolf Pap.
The Marsha Siefert PhD Dissertation Award went to Dr. Kiprovska for her dissertation on "The Role of the Frontier Elites in the Ottoman State-Building Processes: A Case Study on the Mihaloğlu Family". Reading her dissertation was described by Prof. Tijana Krstic as "both an enlightening and a humbling experience—the precision of the arguments as well as the richness of the evidence presented are truly impressive. There is no doubt that the impact of her research on the field will be immense and well-deserved".
The Zvetlana-Mihaela Tanasa prize this year went to Ahmet Demirel. His "impressive thesis takes on 150 years’ worth of data on appointments to the post of Pasha of Buda to explore changes in Ottoman provincial administration from a methodologically innovative perspective". The commitee commended his work for its ambition and originality, particularly with regards to his use of digital humanities.
Okan Kozanoğlu and Botond Rudolf Pap won the Peter Hanák prize for their MA theses. Okan's thesis is "a tour de force of archival research that excavates the foundations of provincial printing in the late Ottoman Empire". Exceptionally well researched and polished, the thesis is publishable scholarship that reflects Okan's excellent work ethic. Botand's thesis is "distinguished by its fine-grained textual analysis". It demonstrates a "complex approach, analytical quality, novel insights and elegant manner of presentation".