2025 Aquila Polonica Article Prize Winner
We’re thrilled to announce that Dr. Louisa M. McClintock, researcher at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Justice Project, has won the 2025 Aquila Polonica Article Prize.
This biennial prize is given to the author(s) of the best English-language article published during the previous two years on any aspect of Polish studies. Administered by the Polish Studies Association (“PSA”), which appoints the independent judges, the award carries a $500 honorarium donated by us.
We launched this prize in 2011, and it has been awarded in odd years ever since — 2025 marks the eighth time the prize has been awarded.
The winning article is “In the Shadow of the Crematoria: Investigating Mass Atrocities in Poland, 1944–1945,” The Journal of Modern History, Volume 96, Number 3 (September 2024), https://doi.org/10.1086/731362
The prize committee — which consisted of Elisa-Maria Hiemer of the Free University of Berlin, Karolina May-Chu of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Barbara Milewski of Swarthmore College — described Dr. McClintock’s article as follows:
Dr. 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.
The committee also awarded an honorable mention to Dr. habil. Jagoda Wierzejska, University of Warsaw, for her excellent article “Artistic Forms of Shaping Ukrainian National Identity by Leon Getz,” Nationalities Papers, Volume 53, Issue 3 (May 2025), https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2024.41
The awards ceremony occurred during PSA’s 2025 annual meeting, which was held in conjunction with the Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, November 20–23, 2025, in Washington, D.C. At the ceremony, the prize committee introduced its decisions as follows:
This year, the award committee received 22 excellent article submissions from a variety of fields, including history, sociology, anthropology, literary and theater studies, and political science. The articles are a testament to the vibrancy of the field of Polish studies, with many of them taking an interdisciplinary approach to their subject of inquiry and guiding the reader to new discoveries or offering fresh perspectives on familiar topics. It was an honor and a pleasure to review and discuss these articles, and we would like to thank all the nominees for sharing their scholarship and allowing us to learn a tremendous amount from their work. Due to the high quality of submissions, the committee decided to award one winner and one honorable mention.
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