Katarzyna Nowak wins Stephen White prize

Katarzyna Nowak’s "Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria" (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023) has been selected as the winner of this year’s Stephen White Prize For The Best First Book In Slavonic And East European Studies!

The judges were unanimous in awarding the prize to this meticulously researched and composed archive-based study of identity formation among displaced Poles at the end of World War II. We admired the exceptional range and variety of sources used, the care with which subjects were handled and the rare sensitivity shown to features like social class. This book will be a key reference for scholars working on displaced people for both its content and methodology, and for anyone seeking to understand better the specific complexity of Polish identity formation in the twentieth century.

Lyubomir Pozharliev, ""The Road to Socialism": Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945-1989) (Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH, 2023), has been commended with an honourable mention:
Lyubomir Pozharliev places a refreshing focus on the making of East Central Europe through the politics of infrastructure, namely, the building of roads in socialist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Besides what can be learned from comparing these two neighbouring countries and their distinct national contexts, The Road to Socialism impressively combines attention to both the utilitarian role of infrastructures and their symbolic role. Through exhaustive knowledge of both countries’ road-building projects, the book exposes how socialist practice failed to live up to its promises and how road networks supposed to unify a new socialist nation could instead keep communities apart.