Dr. Michał Przeperski, a Silas Palmer fellow in 2015, won the second place award in the Professor Alina "Inka" Brodzka-Wald competition, presented at the headquarters of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, for his doctoral dissertation "Mieczysław Rakowski: An Outline of a Political Biography." Dr. Przeperski successfully defended his doctoral dissertation at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in October 2018. The competition serves to honor the memory of Professor Alina Brodzka-Wald, one of Poland's most recognized historians and literature theorists. The memorial fund, established in her name, pursues goals in the areas of education, scholarship, culture, healthcare, and social welfare. In this seventh year of the competition awards were handed out for the most interesting doctoral dissertations in the humanities, dedicated to modern times (defended in the year preceding the competition).
The Mieczysław Rakowski Diaries are the single most important collection in the Hoover Archives on post-World War II Poland, and Dr. Przeperski's dissertation was the first substantial academic work based on the collection. Rakowski was Poland's top communist intellectual and one of the last prime ministers of the communist government in 1988–1989. His diaries and related materials, covering a thirty-eight-year span, are a peerless resource on the inner workings of Polish and Soviet bloc politics of the era, especially during the decade of the Solidarity movement which led to the first semi-free elections in Poland in 1989 after nearly half a century of communist rule.
Michał Przeperski, PhD
Michał Przeperski is a Silas Palmer alum and author of a doctoral dissertation on the political career of Mieczysław F. Rakowski. He is also an employee of the Institute of National Remembrance, specializing in the history of Central Europe in the twentieth century. He graduated in history and law at the University of Warsaw and studied history at the Central European University in Budapest.
