Robyn Dora Radway wins the 2025 Center for Austrian Studies Book Prize
The Center for Austrian Studies is pleased to announce that Robyn Dora Radway (Associate Professor of History, Central European University) is the winner of this year's Book Prize. Radway's book, Portraits of Empires: Habsburg Albums from the German House of Constantinople, was published by Indiana University Press in 2023.
Radway received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Princeton University and an M.A. in Art History from Rutgers in 2011. She has published on material culture, costume books, arms and armor, and the circulation of ephemeral prints.
Radway also participated in the Center for Austrian Studies' Seminar Fellows Program in 2019, "Society, Culture, and Politics in the Habsburg World," which was co-organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Modern and Contemporary Historical Research.
From the Laudatio for the Book Prize:
This extraordinary book stands out by its originality, analytical depth, and the sheer beauty of its production. Based on many years of preparatory work, Radway reconstructs the world of ca. 900 Habsburg subjects who lived in or visited the Habsburg ambassador’s residence (the “German House”) during a period of relative peace with the Ottoman Empire (1568-1593). Her primary interest is in capturing the day-to-day encounters, personal experiences, and contacts that connected residents of the German House (including ordinary men like scribes, barbers and servants) with Ottoman life in Istanbul. She thus departs from a vast literature that views Habsburg- and European-Ottoman relations top-down through the lens of political, military, and diplomatic history. At the center of Radway’s analysis are thirty-four friendship albums (alba amicorum) compiled by inhabitants of the German House—including a master cook and a courier—and now widely dispersed in libraries across Europe, the United States, and Turkey. These magnificent multimedia albums contain painted images, water colors, life sketches, armorials, signatures, and doodles that reflect “an intimate process of sustained interaction with the Ottoman world.” Many of these albums were produced in collaboration with Ottoman artists and artisans; reflected Ottoman techniques of paper decoration, book binding, and calligraphy; or contained notes and signatures by renegades from the Habsburg and Holy Roman empires. One of Radway’s most remarkable accomplishments is to connect these albums with specific individuals through painstaking research in travelogues, memoirs, and archival documents in the Austrian National Archives. In short, Radway approached her subject from multiple angles drawing on astounding expertise in social history, visual analysis, multiple languages, and Historische Hilfswissenschaften (prosopography, paleography, codicology, heraldry, and filigranology). The result is a masterpiece that will be of great interest to scholars well beyond the fields of Habsburg and Ottoman history. The tremendous value of the book is further enhanced by the exquisite reproduction of 162 colour images for which Indiana University deserves the highest commendation.
Congratulations, Professor Radway, on this accomplishment!
About the Prize: The Center for Austrian Studies Book Prize is awarded biennially, and since 1990 has recognized outstanding scholarship published in North America by scholars working across a range of academic disciplines, who conduct groundbreaking research in the fields of Austrian, Habsburg and post-Habsburg, as well as Central and Eastern European Studies.
The next CAS Book Prize winner will be announced in 2027, with a new call for submissions appearing in late 2026. Books published in the 2025 and 2026 calendar years will be eligible for submission.
