Three of our PhD candidates have won CEU awards for Advanced Doctoral Students. Jakub Gawkowski, Bernat Racz and Karsten Schuil all received recognition this academic year for their excellent research.
Jakub's PhD project examines the history of museums in the industrial city of Łódź in central Poland between the late 1940s and the early 1990s, using them to illuminate broader transformations of temporality. It explores how museums, alongside the factories that defined the city’s character, both reflected and shaped prevailing models and experiences of time, and how, in turn, they became sites where these temporal frameworks were affirmed and contested through exhibition narratives, display strategies, and artistic experimentation. He argues that in Łódź, a city that developed rapidly and unevenly in the nineteenth century without significant cultural institutions, museums after 1945 became important not only within the emerging public sphere but also as spaces for negotiating, imagining, and structuring relationships to the past, present, and future.
Bernat’s PhD research examines a group of twelfth-century Mosan enamels. His other projects include serving as editor of the forthcoming archaeological volume Synergia, published by the Katona József Museum of Kecskemét. In collaboration with the same museum, he is also part of a research project on the medieval liturgical artworks of the Great Hungarian Plain.
Many thanks to the PhD candidates for their texts