Recent Award Recipients

November 2025

• The 2025 PSA Graduate Student Research Award goes to Łukasz Kiełpiński for his project: “From Warsaw Uprising to Black Panthers: How Edward Laudański Became Edouard de Laurot“. In his field research, to be conducted in New York City and Los Angeles, Łukasz Kiełpiński will reconstruct the life and intellectual legacy of Edward Laudański—better known in the West as Edouard de Laurot—a Warsaw insurgent turned political filmmaker and theorist engaged with the Black Panthers movement. In his promising dissertation project, the award-winner will aim to recover a forgotten chapter of Polish participation in transnational cultural history and intellectual exchange in the 20th century.
• 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 Aquila Polonica Prize 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.

November 2024

• The 2024 PSA Syllabus Award goes to Agnieszka Jeżyk, Maria Kott Endowed Assistant Professor of Polish Studies, from the University of Washington for her class syllabus “The Other in Other Europe: Poland’s Racial and Ethnic Other.”
• The 2024 PSA Dissertation Award goes to Ewelina Sikora (Central European University, Vienna/Budapest) for her work “Table set for diplomats: food, drink, and politics in Poland-Lithuania’s diplomatic relations, 1674–1696”. (Comparative History, supervisor: Jan Hennings). Ewelina combined the study of food history with diplomatic history to create a cultural narrative of Polish-Lithuanian foreign relations, analyzing how culinary exchanges influenced political negotiations.
  Furthermore, there were two honorable mentions:
  – Leah Valtin-Erwin “The Shop Across the Border: Western European Retail and the Making of Post–Communist (Super–)Market Societies in Eastern Europe, 1989—1999” (Indiana University Bloomington, Supervisor: Padraic Kenney)
  – Aleksandra Jakubczak “(Sex)Worker, Migrant, Daughter: The Jewish Economics of Sex and Mobility, 1870-1939” (Columbia University, Supervisor: Rebecca Kobrin)
  
  The next call for these awards will be in 2026.