Emerging Scholar Travel Award
This award was originally established in 2008 as the Graduate Student Research Paper Award. Since 2017, PAHA has been offering the Graduate Student/Young Scholar Travel Grant, and since 2022: the Emerging Scholar Travel Award. We welcome submissions by junior scholars (graduate students and emerging scholars - up to three years after graduation) dealing with the experience of the Polish diaspora in any historical epoch, scholarly field, or aspect. The grant is intended to facilitate the winners' travel to present their papers at the PAHA Annual Meeting. Two grants per year are currently available ($500 each).
PAHA TRAVEL GRANT WINNERS
2023: IWONA FLIS and BENJAMIN BAX
Iwona Flis is a PhD student at the University of Gdansk, Faculty of History, under Dr. Anna Mazurkiewicz. She is a fourth-year graduate student completing her dissertation next summer for which she has worked extensively in the PIASA archives documenting their history. She has already contributed to PAHA through her work on indexes to the CCSU’s scanned PAHA Newsletter, assisting in the PAHA NEH grant submission and currently is a member of the PAHA Board. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications and presented internationally on a variety of topics including Polish Diaspora organization, community archives and émigré women scholars. As the founder and president of the “Pomerania Archives” Foundation she has implemented several educational projects in history and archival science for community archives and NGO’s in Poland.
Benjamin Bax is currently at Swansea University UK as part of a joint PhD program with the University of Central Oklahoma. He recently had a scholarly publication the Chronicles of Oklahoma for his research on the legacy of the Polish community of Harrah which is one of two papers he presented at the conference. His second presentation was on “Defiant Poles and the Displaced Persons Act” based on his thesis topic “From Kowalski to Kowalski: Internal Identity Formation and External Perception of the Polish Diaspora in American Popular Culture and Immigration Policy during the Cold War and Beyond.” He earned a Juris Doctor Degree from the University of Tulsa College of Law. He has contributed to PAHA’s “Objects that Speak” project.
2022: DOROTA CHOINSKA and NATALIE CORNETT
Dorota Choinska (Wroclaw) Ms. Choinska holds an MA in Public History from the University of Wroclaw and is currently in her second year of a Ph.D. program in History at the University of Wroclaw and the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Her supervisors are Joanna Wojdon and Marc Gil Garrusta, under whom she is preparing her doctoral thesis on Polish refugees who sought refuge in Spain from Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. Her research interests are migration and refugee studies, politics of memory, and qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis. She utilizes police interrogations as sources in migration studies as a study of migratory fluxes and their participants, particularly those deemed as illegal or undesirable. She received a Preludium20 research grant from the National Science Center in Poland as well as a Fulbright Junior Research Award to conduct research at New York University beginning in September 2022.
Natalie Cornett (Canada) Dr. Cornett is currently a postdoctoral fellow researcher at McGill University (Montreal) in the Dept. of History and Classical Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Brandeis University: her dissertation was entitled: “The Politics of Love: The ‘Enthusiasts’ and Feminism in Nineteenth Century Poland”. She also has a MA in Cultural Studies from the Jagellionian University and her undergraduate degree in Arts in History is from the University of Toronto. She is an editorial assistant for the Canadian Slavonic Papers. She is the guest editor of the forthcoming issue (Fall 2023) Polish Review “Gender and the Nation.” Her current research explores internationalist socialism through the person of Rosa Luxemburg and her views on the Polish question.
2021: KINGA LANGOWSKA
The travel grant was awarded to Kinga Langowska a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Gdańsk. She is on the project team at the Emigration Museum in Gdynia dealing with the issues of highly qualified Polish emigrants, migration stereotypes and migration plans of the young generation of Poles. She serves on the editorial team of the „Polish Migration Review.” She has been selected as a Fulbright junior research scholar and will be spending 10 months at U of Michigan Ann Arbor in 2022-2023.
2019: OLEKSANDR AVRAMCHUK AND PIOTR PUCHALSKI
The Young Scholar Travel Grant ($500) were presented at PAHA's 77th Annual Meeting in New York on 4 January 2020.
OLEKSANDR AVRAMCHUK is a Ph.D. student at the University of Warsaw. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the vision of Ukraine in Polish émigré historical thought in the United States during the Cold War. The scope of his academic interests ranges from Polish-Ukrainian relations to modern nation-building processes in Central and Eastern Europe. He is an author of several scholarly articles and essays on Polish, Ukrainian and Russian historical thought in the 20 th century, as well as the American attitudes toward Eastern Europe.
Dr. Puchalski and Mr. Avramchuk with their Grant Certificates.
DR. PIOTR PUCHALSKI of the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time of award. Dr. Piotr Puchalski was born in Warsaw, Poland and moved to New York City at the age of thirteen. He attended high school in Brooklyn and earned Bachelor’s degrees in European Studies and French from New York University. When Piotr applied for this award, he was still a Ph.D. candidate in modern European history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since then, not only did he defend his doctoral dissertation but also accepted the position of assistant professor of history at the Institute of History and Archival Studies of the Pedagogical University of Cracow, where he currently lives.
2018
Florence Vychytil-Baudoux and Weronika Grzebalska
The Graduate Student/Young Scholar Travel Grant to young and promising scholar in the humanities or social sciences. The winner receives a travel grant to present the paper at the PAHA Annual Meeting. This year PAHA recognized two young outstanding scholars: Weronika Grzebalska and Florence Vychytil-Baudoux.
Sarah Moxy Moczygemba receives Travel Grant from Dr. Mazurkiewicz. Photo by Marcin Szerle
2017 - Sarah “Moxy” Moczygemba
Ms. Moczygemba is a Religious Studies doctoral student at the University of Florida. Her dissertation will focus on ethnic identity, historical memory, and Catholicism in the Silesian Polish Texan community. Ms. Moczygemba presented a lecture during PAHA conference in Washigton DC in January 2018 exploring the relationship between space and memory in the contemporary Polish American Catholic community in South Texas associated with the Panna Maria settlement, focusing on efforts to remember and commemorate the experience of immigration by emphasizing its historical and present-day ties to Roman Catholicism.
Aleksandra Kurowska-Susdorf with President Grazyna Kozaczka, Denver, CO, 2017.
2016 - Aleksandra Kurowska-Susdorf
The first Young Scholar Travel Grant was presented to Alexandra Kurowska-Susdorf from the University of Gdańsk, Poland, for her paper “Creating Identity: Discussion around Kashubian and Polish Identity in Canada and Poland” in recognition of her outstanding research into Polish Kashubian emigre history and culture.
GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH PAPER AWARD
Established in 2008, the Graduate Student Research Paper Award recognizes outstanding research into Polish-American history and culture by a young scholar in the humanities or social sciences. The winner received a travel grant to present the paper at the PAHA Annual Meeting and was encouraged to submit the work for consideration by the Polish American Studies.
2016 - Joanna Kulpinska from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland for her paper "Multigenerational Migration Chains of Families from Babica: An Attempt at Typology."
2014 - Rachel Rothstein (Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Florida, Gainesville), "Defending the Remnants: American Jews Respond to Poland's 1968 Anti-Zionist Campaign"
2013 Two Awards Given
1: Marta Cieślak (Transnational Studies Department, SUNY at Buffalo), "Crossing the Boundaries of Modernity: The Transatlantic Journey of Polish Peasants to the United States"
2: Piotr Derengowski (Department of History, University of Gdansk, Poland), "Capt. Alexander Raszewski's Polish Legion and Other Less Known Polish Troops in the Union Army During the American Civil War"
2008 - Michael T. Urbanski. In 2008, PAHA recognized Michael Urbanski (Central Connecticut State University) for the paper entitled: "Polite Avoidance: The Story of the Closing of Alliance College," which was subsequently published in the Polish American Studies, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring, 2009), pp. 25-42. This paper focuses on the history and controversial closing of the Polish National Alliance’s College in Cambridge Springs Pennsylvania. Article Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20533157