Call for Nominations: Best Article Award

The Polish Memory Studies Group, a regional group of the Memory Studies Association, invites nominations for an award for the best scholarly article in memory studies published in 2023 or 2024.

Laureates of previous editions

2023

Ex aequo: Jan Gryta for article “Regional professionals, American activists, and the Iron Curtain: transnational memory work during the Cold War in the Jewish neighbourhood of Kraków”

And

Lidia Zessin-Jurek for article “Whose Victims and Whose Survivors? Polish Jewish Refugees between Holocaust and Gulag Memory Cultures”

2021

Jessica Robbins for article “Expanding Personhood beyond Remembered Selves: The Sociality of Memory at an Alzheimer’s Center in Poland”.

In this year’s edition we would like to recognize scholarly articles in Polish memory studies that were published in 2023 or 2024 in a peer-reviewed journal.

Eligible themes include, but are not limited to:

• Polish collective memory (e.g. state, regional, local, regional) and historical policy autobiographical memory, oral history;
• memories of ethnic, national and religious minorities in Poland or the historical Commonwealth among other émigré groups.

Memory Studies is multidisciplinary enterprise, thus competition entries can be articles in any scientific discipline and/or subdiscipline (e.g. anthropology, ethnology, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, literature, psychology, history, media, law and others) that deal with any aspect(s) of memory.

Conditions of participation in the competition:

1. The text of the article must be submitted by email by 28 February 2025 in PDF format. The file should contain information identifying the article, including the DOI or ISSN number of the journal along with the page numbers. Entries may only be submitted by the author(s) of the article. In case of texts with multiple authors, a statement of consent to participate in the competition is required from all co-authors. A form for this purpose can be obtained from the competition secretary mgr Bartosz Smoczyk by emailing him at msapoland@gmail.com; this should be signed, scanned and sent with the submission.
2. Eligible articles must have been published in Polish or English in 2023 or 2024 in a peer-review scholarly journal. The date of first publication of the text can be no earlier than 1 January 2023 and no later than 31 December 2024. For texts published “online first”, the date of the first (online) publication shall be considered binding.
3. The submitted article deals with selected issues in the field of memory studies and concerns the memory or memories of or about persons and/or communities, territories, material or intangible culture, or other matters related to Poland or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in any historical period.
4. The text submitted must be an original scholarly article and must not be a review, polemic or essay.

The awarded article will be the basis for a discussion with the author’s participation (on-site or remotely) which will take place during the 5th Polish Memory Studies Conference in November 2025 in Katowice.

Entries of nominated articles in PDF format, along with any additional information, should be sent by email to the competition secretary mgr Bartosz Smoczyk at msapoland@gmail.com no later than 28 February 2025.

The results of the competition will be announced by 30 June 2025.

Organizers:

Dr. Kamilla Biskupska, University of Wroclaw

Dr. Barthomiej Krzystan, Institute of Political Studies Polish Academy of Science

Dr Anna Kurpiel, University of Wroclaw

Prof. Dr. Simon Lewis, University of Bremen

Dr. Malgorzata Lukianow, University of Lodz

Mgr Bartosz Smoczyk, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Competition Secretary.