The Aquila Polonica Prize is awarded every other year to the author of the best English-language article published (either online or in print) during the previous two years on any aspect of Polish studies. The award carries a $500 honorarium (thanks to the generous support of Aquila Polonica Publishing, which specializes in publishing the Polish experience of World War II), and is announced at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Deadline for nominations and self-nominations is July 15, 2025.
Please submit article nominations directly to all members of the prize committee: Elisa-Maria Hiemer (e.hiemer@fu-berlin.de), Karolina May-Chu (maychu@uwm.edu), Barbara Milewski (bmilews1@swarthmore.edu)
2025 Winner:
The 2025 Aquila Polonica Prize goes to Louisa M. McClintock for her article: “In the Shadow of the Crematoria: Investigating Mass Atrocities in Poland, 1944–1945“, which appeared last year in The Journal of Modern History, the leading American journal for the study of European intellectual, political, and cultural history.
McClintock’s article offers a nuanced and sophisticated argument about the challenging work done by the Main Commission to Investigate German War Crimes in Poland. This meticulously researched study, drawing on sources across multiple languages–some previously overlooked–considers the broader context of a European-wide network of state-sponsored war crimes commissions. The author takes into account the complications of emergent ideological divides between east and west, the immediate political concerns of a new Polish communist regime-turned-state, and the categories of identity that were manipulated against the backdrop of both.
2025 Honorable Mention:
The PSA would like to extend an honorable mention to Jagoda Wierzejska for her article: “Artistic Forms of Shaping Ukrainian National Identity by Leon Getz,” which appeared earlier this year in the journal Nationalities Papers, published by Cambridge University Press and featuring cutting-edge multidisciplinary work on nationalism, migration, diasporas, and ethnic conflict.
The article tells the story of Leon Getz (1896–1971), a 20th-century graphic artist, draftsman and painter raised in a Polish-Ukrainian family in Lviv who made the intentional decision to identify nationally with the Ukrainian minority, oppressed both in pre- and postwar Poland. Wierzejska’s article raises awareness of a lesser-known historical figure who made meaningful contributions to both Ukrainian and Polish culture. Using an array of archival sources and especially an epistolary record to excellent effect, Wierzejska’s article provides a deeply humane perspective on Getz’s life and work by skillfully interweaving questions of personal identity and his agonizing choices made against the backdrop of larger historical and political forces wrought by empire, wars and competing national aspirations.
2023 Winner:
Through an in-depth and robust analysis, Barbara Milewski and Bret Werb explore the attitude of Fryderyk Chopin to Jewish music. Drawing on a rich array of sources, they trace the birth and development of the narrative that has seen Chopin as genuinely interested and inspired by Jewish musical traditions. As Milewski and Werb show, this narrative has been sensitive to the changing historical context, leading to the perception of Chopin as either a friend of Jews or an anti-Semite. Through a rich and impressive analysis, the authors challenge these narratives. By getting back to the sources and building on ethnographic accounts, they provide a new and complex interpretation, putting Chopin in a broad socio-cultural context. The article is engaging and beautifully written. It offers a compelling model of an interdisciplinary analysis that uncovers historical realities that broaden our understanding of central themes in Polish studies.
Barbara Milewski is Daniel Underhill Professor of Music at Swarthmore College
Bret Werb is Music Collection Curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
2023 Honorable Mention:
This article is a lucid and carefully written analysis of how the Nazi German occupiers co-opted village structures into their power system in Poland during WWII. As such, it treads into difficult historiographic terrain: Polish-Jewish relations, and the wartime experience under occupation; but it does so with sensitivity and originality. Focusing on the pivotal but under-examined role of the village head (sołtys) in decision making, the piece highlights the ethical dilemmas facing individuals within this structure. It does so by exploring both historiographic context and unearthing new archival material, which takes the form of testimonies from post-war collaboration trials. Frydel’s approach bypasses normative judgment on individuals, underscoring the pressures created by the system. In so doing, it makes a solid contribution to a field that is both contentious and crowded.
Tomasz Frydel is Research Contractor at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
2023 Honorable Mention:
In an article driven by outstanding literary analysis and beautiful writing, Karolina Watroba juxtaposes Zofia Nałkowska’s Choucas with Thomas Mann’s canonical The Magic Mountain and, through excellent close-reading and meticulous analysis, she convincingly pinpoints equivalencies between the two works as well as deeper interrelationships inscribed in such a pairing. Her literary comparison positions the underrepresented voices of Eastern European literature on an equal footing with the dominant narratives of the West, as well as women’s writing in dialogue with the privileged male voice. Such thought-provoking comparison produces a blueprint for a method that opens up space for a dialogical exchange between works of different status and cultural significance. The article is a very accessible piece of scholarly work that both highlights the work of a Eastern European female author and introduces an innovative method that engages with Polish studies on an interdisciplinary level.
Karolina Watroba is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK
2021 Winner:
The prize committee was deeply impressed with Robbins’s examination of a case study of elderly Poles being treated for memory loss. Robbins observed treatment that encouraged the recall of common national memory as opposed to individual memories, with salutary effects on the patients. Her argument about what she calls the “sociality of memory” offers a way forward for the care of those with Alzheimer’s disease but also offers broader insights about the social position of the elderly, nationalism, memory, and modern Poland. Robbins’s solid methodology, clear research design, sustained argumentation, reference to the relevant scholarship, and careful attention to the specifically Polish context of her study made her piece stand out. Specifically, she shows that individuals with memory loss may have access to a shared historical narrative specific to Poland. More importantly, she demonstrates that this narrative generates the possibility of new social bonds where “personal” memories have lapsed and creates pathways for support and treatment on the part of caregivers who also have access to this narrative. Robbins’s work positions “national memory” in a new role—inherently neither exclusionary nor inclusionary, but rather a functioning memory structure generating a sense of personhood when other sources are no longer accessible.
Professor Robbins received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. She has won several awards and grants, and authored numerous articles, book chapters and her first book, Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood, which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Jessica Robbins is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University.
2019 Winner:
Natalia Aleksiun, “Intimate Violence: Jewish Testimonies on Victims and Perpetrators in Eastern Galicia,” Holocaust Studies 23, no. 1-2 (2017): 17-33.
Natalia Aleksiun forcefully argues that the documentation of the postwar trials of “fascist-Hitlerite” criminals yields important insights into the wartime experience of Jews in eastern Poland. Though these trials were designed to reinforce the Communist Party’s emphasis on Polish “victims of fascism” rather than Jewish victims of the Holocaust, their witness statements and courtroom records prove revelatory rather than propagandistic. In her close readings of four specific court cases, Aleksiun succeeds in tracing the contradictory behaviors and complex motivations of the Greek and Roman Catholic perpetrators of crimes against the Jews. Her analysis of this everyday intimate violence highlights the twists and turns of unpredictable, often treacherous human drama: Jewish victims’ profound shock at the suddenly fierce aggression of gentile neighbors and acquaintances; desperate Jewish negotiation of alternating help and betrayal from the same gentile family; and the instance of a gentile woman’s “resentment” of a former Jewish classmate resulting in robbery and blackmail, yet dismissed by the prosecutor as an act of spite rather than a criminal act. Natalia Aleksiun’s deep dive into these trial records, extensive knowledge of her sources and their context, clear and sustained argument, and nuanced analysis of cases of everyday intimate violence amply merit her receipt of the 2017-2018 Aquila Polonica Prize.
2017 Winner:
Geneviève Zubrzycki’s 2016 article ‘Nationalism, “Philosemitism,” and Symbolic Boundary-Making in Contemporary Poland’ (Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(1):66–98) makes an outstanding contribution to the field of Polish studies. Zubrzycki brilliantly frames the ‘Jewish revival’ in Poland – synthesizing a now considerable body of research – to press for a more supple application of key sociological theories of nationalism and group identity. The article presents its topic in an engaging, well-researched, and nuanced way; juxtaposes philo-Semitic with anti-Semitic discourse; and frames both in the context of reformulations of nation. This allows us to understand these practices much better as well as see their further repercussions, and rethink more general mechanisms governing nations. All in all, the article is profound and full of insight. It is meticulously scholarly but also written in an accessible and lively manner.
2015 Winners:
Piotr Kosicki’s article clearly demonstrates that the author is a master in the discipline of history and a defender of a publicly engaged scholarly work. Piotr’s carefully researched, beautifully written and extremely gripping article explores the historical trajectory of the discourse of the Polish Catholic right and its contemporary implications. In so doing, it situates a fascinating Polish case in a broader context, tracing connections between the Polish Christian ideology and political and philosophical movements in other European countries, shading a new light on the ideological underpinnings of Polish Antisemitism, and questioning some widespread assumptions regarding the role of Catholic politicians and intellectuals in prewar and postwar Poland. Strongly grounded in history, it forces the reader to reflect on contemporary Polish scene. And it simply does what an exemplary article on Poland should do: going beyond the narrative of Polish “specificity,” it shows that a specific Polish case study helps us understand more general and widespread phenomena.
The committee was very impressed with Jakelski’s well-written, historiographically significant, and analytically sophisticated article on an original topic—the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music. Jakelski sought out and analyzed original archival sources in order to present a highly nuanced argument about Cold War mobility, the nature of borders, and the complex set of relations—both within the Soviet Bloc and between Poland and “the West”—during the globalized 1960s. Particularly important is Jakelski’s dual focus on how cross-border connections could be both “top-down”—i.e. orchestrated by those working in an official capacity for the state—and “bottom-up”—i.e. consisting of the informal networks of people who circulated ideas about modernist music. Overall, Jakelski shows us that studying music does not simply provide a way to talk about the breaking down or the erecting of borders during the Cold War, tropes that can often be polemical and over-simplistic. Rather, this nuanced study of the constantly changing reconfigurations of metaphorical and literal borders makes her work relevant to those working beyond the field of Polish Studies. At the same time, however, Poland—a country that, she argues, was of particular significance “in cementing cultural ties between Eastern and Western Europe”—remains the central point of analysis.
Pasieka challenges our understanding of a trope that most people caught up in the debates over Jan Gross’s work took completely for granted: neighbors and neighborliness. She draws on critical literature far beyond Poland to show that the paradigm of neighborliness as harmonious ethnic coexistence hinges on an idealized multicultural past. Pasieka uses her own fieldwork conducted in Southern Poland to present the Polish-Lemko relationship as a foil to get us past the binarism of Polish-Jewish identity issues. In her close analysis of narratives of conflict such as the Jedwabne debates, she finds contradictory patterns of neighborliness that can accommodate both the embrace of the other as “family” and the preservation of intergroup boundaries between “us” and “them.” There is a danger in romanticizing the neighborhood as a unit of measure, Pasieka argues, and her article successfully compels us to think through these difficult issues on a different scale.
2013 Winner:
2011 Winners:
2009 Winner:
2006 Winner:
Polish Studies Association 