Distinguished Research Award, 1999-2000

The winner of Trent University's Distinguished Award for 1999-2000 is Professor Alena Heitlinger of the Department of Sociology. Born in Czechoslovakia, Professor Heitlinger studied as an undergraduate in the UK at the University of Kent at Canterbury. She received her doctorate in 1978 from the University of Leicester. Professor Heitlinger came to Trent in 1975 while still at work on her dissertation. Over the past quarter century she has developed into a prolific and highly respected scholar while serving many important institutional roles at Trent, including two terms as Chair of Sociology. To date she is the author of five books and the editor of another. She has also published numerous articles on variety of women's, demographic and health issues. She has done consultative work for Health and Welfare Canada, and is much in demand as a speaker at Canadian and international conferences. In recent years she has been appointed as an Honorary Professor at Charles University in Prague and DeMontford University in Leicester (UK).

While drawing on her own Eastern European background and her keen interest in feminist issues, Professor Heitlinger's scholarly work has been path-breaking in several facets. Her first book, Women and State Socialism (1979) broke new ground for sociologists and has become a standard reference on issues involving women in communist Eastern Europe. Her strong concern with medical and nursing issues, and with the evolving position of women in state socialist societies, were wedded in her 1987 study, Reproduction, Medicine, and the Socialist State, which, as one reviewer noted, makes "a distinct contribution to our knowledge of contemporary East European society." Subsequently, she has written Women's Equality, Demography and Public Policies: A Comparative Perspective (1993). Based on comparative data from Canada, Australia, Britain and, to a more limited extent, the USA, the book is described by one critic as a "monumental project", and an accessible yet myth-shattering study. Revisiting her Czech roots, in 1998 Professor Heitlinger published both Czech and English editions of Young Women of Prague. Co-authored with Susanna Trnka, the book explores the lives of young Czech women who came of age in the aftermath of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Last year, Professor Heitlinger published Émigré Feminism: Transnational Perspectives, an edited collection of articles based on a conference she organized at Trent in 1996. In the words of one external American reviewer, "Professor Heitlinger is widely recognized as a major scholar of gender and socialist and postsocialist societies.

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