Wayne S. Vucinich

Wayne S. Vucinich (June 23, 1913 - April 21, 2005) was an American historian and professor and a founding father of Russian and East European scholarship after World War II.

Life

Vucinich was born into a family of Serbian emigrants originating from Bosnia and Herzegovina.^[1] He attended his early education in Herzegovina and Los Angeles.^[2] He attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning a M.A. in East European history in 1936. He continued to pursue his doctoral studies between 1936 and 1941, also studying at Charles University in Prague.

After graduating, Vucinich joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and worked as an analyst for the Balkans and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In the course of his assignments, he visited London, Bari and Sofia. In 1946, after working in the State Department for a year, he accepted an offer to teach in Stanford's History Department, where he remained until his formal retirement in 1978.

From 1972 to 1985, Vucinich was director of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies. He also taught at Stanford's overseas campuses in Florence, Beutelsbach and Vienna. In 1977, he was appointed to Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies at Stanford, a chair first established for Vucinich. He held it for many years after his formal retirement in 1978. Among his students were David Kennedy and Norman Naimark.

In his teaching and research, Vucinich covered a broad area of history, encompassing general European history, modern history, history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, the Balkans, Ottoman and Byzantine history, and nationalities of the Soviet Union.

From 1981 to 1982, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, which established the Vucinich Book Prize in his honor in 1982. The Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published English in the United States in the previous calendar year.^[3]

Selected works

• Serbian foreign policy 1903-1909. Thesis (M.A.), University of California, Berkeley 1936.
• Serbian foreign policy, 1903-1908. Thesis (Ph.D.) University of California, Berkeley 1941.
• The Second World War and beyond. 1949.
• Yugoslavs of the Moslem faith. 1949.
• Serbia between East and West; the events of 1903-1908. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1954.
• Yugoslavs in California. Los Angeles 1960.
• The Ottoman Empire, its record and legacy. Van Nostrand, Princeton, N.J. 1965.
• The peasant in nineteenth-century Russia: a conference on the Russian peasant in the nineteenth century. Stanford 1966.
• Contemporary Yugoslavia; twenty years of Socialist experiment. (With Jozo Tomasevich; Stanford University.; et al.) University of California Press, Berkeley 1969.
• Russia and Asia; essays on the influence of Russia on the Asian peoples. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. ©1972.
• Eastern Europe. Ginn, Lexington, Mass. 1973.
• Croatian illyrism; its background and genesis. 1975.
• A study in social survival: the katun in Bileća Rudine. University of Denver, Graduate School of International Studies, Denver ©1975.
• Nation and ideology: essays in honour of Wayne S. Vucinich. (With Ivo Banac.) East European monographs, Boulder; Columbia U.P. (distr.) New York, 1981.
• The First Serbian uprising, 1804-1813. Social Science Monographs; New York. Distributed by Columbia University Press, Boulder 1982.
• At the brink of war and peace: the Tito-Stalin split in a historic perspective. Social Science Monographs, Brooklyn College Press, New York. Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1982.
• Kosovo: legacy of a medieval battle. (With Thomas Allan Emmert.) University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. 1991.
• Ivo Andric revisited: the bridge still stands. International and Area Studies, Berkeley, ©1995.
• Memoirs of my childhood in Yugoslavia. (With Larry Wolff.) Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, Palo Alto, Calif. ©2007.

References