PITT PROFESSOR JANINE WEDEL WINS PRESTIGIOUS GRAWEMEYER AWARD FROM UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 30 -- Janine Wedel, an anthropologist and associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Pittsburgh, has won the 2001 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, for her book analyzing the dangers of ill-planned, poorly executed, and misdirected foreign aid.

Wedel will receive a cash prize of $200,000. Her book, "Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998"

(St. Martin's Press, 1998), was chosen from among 51 nominations submitted this year by individuals and organizations throughout the world. She was nominated by Fouad Ajami, professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Wedel, who also serves as the director of research development at GSPIA's Ridgway Center for Security Studies, has studied the evolving economic and social order in Eastern Europe for 20 years, including eight years of field work in the region.

In her book, Wedel said that a raft of fly-in, fly-out consultants and reforms financed by Western taxpayers did little to help Russia and other former Soviet bloc nations build themselves as democratic, free-market states, and that the American government helped wreak economic and social disaster in Russia by providing inappropriate policy advice and aid to corrupt power brokers.

In September, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Harvard University and two of its scholars who were under federal contract to provide economic and legal advice on Russian privatization during the aid process. The lawsuit accuses the scholars of profiting from that enterprise.

"This is a book that is bound to have a long-term impact on the practice and politics of foreign aid from the West to non-western economies," said the Grawemeyer selection committee.

A three-time Fulbright fellow, Wedel has received awards from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the United States Institute of Peace, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

As a policy-analyst anthropologist, Wedel has testified before congressional committees and frequently participates at the National Research Council and National Academy of Science workshops. She is a member of the U.S.-Ukranian Working Group on Organized Crime.

Wedel has served as associate producer of three PBS documentaries on Eastern Europe and has contributed articles and opinion pieces to more than a dozen major news outlets, such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor.

News coverage of her work has appeared on CNN and National Public Radio, and in a host of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, Nation, New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Investor's Business Daily, Vanity Fair, Moscow Times, and Pravda.

Wedel earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1985, a master's degree in anthropology from Indiana University in 1981, and a bachelor's degree in history and the social sciences and German from Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, in 1978.

Her other books are "The Unplanned Society: Poland During and After Communism" (Columbia University Press, 1992) and "The Private Poland: An Anthropologist Looks at Everyday Life" (Facts on File, 1986).

The late Charles Grawemeyer was an industrialist, entrepreneur, and University of Louisville graduate who had a lifelong passion for music, education, and religious studies. Rather than rewarding personal achievements, he chose to recognize powerful ideas or creative works in the arts and sciences.

The Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville awards

$1 million each year, $200,000 each for works in music composition, education ideas improving world order, religion, and psychology. The Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion is given by the University and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

For more information on the Grawemeyer Awards, visit the web site at http://www.grawemeyer.org.

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