The grant will enable Dr Bębnowski to implement the project entitled "Polish Economics in the USA, 1945–1989" during a three-month research fellowship in the academic year 2024/2025 at the renowned Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York. The aim of the research is to identify and characterise the main directions of development of the Polish economy in exile in the USA after World War II, which have not yet been explored. Next to Polish economics in Great Britain, it was the most serious alternative to domestic science dominated by the Marxist paradigm under the communist regime.
It will be particularly important to access the archival and library collections of the most important Polish émigré research centres in New York: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA), the Alfred Jurzykowski Memorial Library PIASA and Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America and its library. The results of the current research will be presented and consulted during seminars by an interdisciplinary group of the Harriman Institute employees.
This will be the second research stay of Dr Bębnowski in the USA. He conducted doctoral research at Columbia University and Harvard University in Cambridge in 2018. The postdoctoral book entitled "The Importance of Constitutional Rules and Property Rights: The German Economy in 1990–2015" was published in 2022 by Peter Lang Verlag and received the University of Lodz Rector's Award in 2023. The current project is an extension of one of the areas of Dr Bębnowski's previous research, i.e. Polish emigre economic historiography in Great Britain and the USA during the Cold War. In 2024, Dr Bębnowski was invited to participate in a scientific seminar at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin as a commentator on a paper by two economists from the University of Pennsylvania on Alfred Zauberman, an émigré economist from Lodz.