Professor Evgeny Dobrenko has received the Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for his new theory of socialist realism and its extension into an all-embracing semiotics of Soviet culture and society.
The Association praised his publications as having "radically redefined the ways scholars everywhere in the world approach socialist realism and Soviet culture in general", while also highlighting his work "as an organiser and intellectual leader of several large-scale projects".
The Association’s Katerina Clark wrote that Dobrenko “commands a virtually encyclopedic knowledge of all branches of Russian intellectual life during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Yet, at the same time, he has the theoretical sophistication to draw on this knowledge in producing a series of original and thought-provoking books, which are widely used by scholars today.”