2007 Stow Persons Prize

Jessica Werneke has been presented the 2007 Stow Persons Prize by the Department of History.  Named for former member of the department Stow Persons, the prize is awarded for the best senior thesis.

In Far From Home: Women in Soviet Prisons, Jessica Werneke tackles a dark and understudied chapter in Soviet history. Her thesis draws on memoir literature to tease out the ways in which women's experience in the gulag differed from that of men. Rather than examining the question of gender through widely read memoirs, such as those by Nadezhda Mandelshtam or Evgeniia Ginzberg, Werneke crafts a collective biography through her analysis of the writings of four lesser-known political prisoners whose incarcerations ranged from the 1920s to the 1970s. Her thesis highlights the centrality of social issues among the prisoners, the rituals of daily life, and the sexual and other forms of exploitation to which these women were subjected.

Jessica is now a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her thesis director was Professor Paula Michaels.