The Aquila Polonica Prize 2013 goes to the VWI Research Fellow Katherine Lebow

The biennial Aquila Polonica Prize is given to the author of the best English-language article published during the previous two years on any aspect of Polish studies. The award carries a $500 honorarium (thanks to the generous support of Aquila Polonica Publishing, which specializes in publishing the Polish experience of World War II), and is announced at the National Convention of the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

 The winner of the 2013 Aquila Polonica Prize is Katherine Lebow, for her article "The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Autobiography and Social Rights" (Humanity 3:3 [Winter 2012] 297-319). In this article, Lebow has recovered an immensely significant yet almost entirely neglected set of sources, viewing them through a complex analytical lens of social rights and achieving thereby the rare feat of illuminating both the sources themselves and the lens through which they are viewed. Combining the interpretive skills of historian and textual critic, in her elegantly written article Lebow directs the attention of human rights theorists to the voices of working class Poles in the interwar years and to the meanings inherent in both the collection and the casual neglect of their writings. By publishing "The Conscience of the Skin" in an interdisciplinary, transnational journal of human rights scholarship, Lebow clearly demonstrates that the study of Polish subjects can be of the broadest interest across the disciplines both within and beyond the spheres of Polish Studies.