Award Jury Report 2025

 Jan Lucassen Award 2025

 Jury report

It is with great pleasure that the committee announces the results of this year’s award. The committee was pleased to receive eleven interesting papers, all of which met the basic requirements for submission (including a letter of recommendation from the supervisor, appropriate length, references, etc.). Each member of the committee carefully reviewed all the papers, and, as we have done since 2014, we would like to begin with an overview of the topics before announcing the winners.  

In general, there is a good balance between social, economic and socio-political approaches. This is also true of the geographical distribution, at least as far as Europe is concerned. From south to north we find papers on Greece, Italy (3), the Alpine region, the Balkans and Sweden. But with one exception: unlike previous conferences, and therefore remarkable, Western Europe is almost completely absent! Papers on the European reception of the Mongol invasions, scientific transmissions between the Arab and European medieval worlds, and the classical trade routes between Egypt and India take a broader view. One paper analyses VR representations of historical events in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

This time the different historical periods were quite well represented. One paper dealt with Classical Antiquity, no less than three with the Middle Ages, two with the early modern period, and four with more recent history, up to the last few decades. This time only the nineteenth century (quite popular at other conferences) was sparsely represented with one paper.

Methodologically, interdisciplinarity in the sense of a real and fruitful combination of social and historical sciences - one of the ideals of the ESSHC - was and is rare. If, however, it is understood as the combination of different types of written sources in different languages, this edition of the prize has seen remarkable achievements, including more than a dozen languages and scripts, including Karoshti and Nabataean.

Applications came from universities in Austria (3), Germany (2), Italy (2), Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA. The gender balance was in favour of female applicants. Although most of the authors were not native speakers, the essays were well written and easy to read.

 The unanimous winner is Karmen Misiou (European University Institute, Florence-Fiesole) for her paper "Beyond Backlash - Unveiling Identity Transformations in the face of Institutional Discrimination". In an exemplary way, she reviews the various social science theories that have been developed around discriminatory state intervention in outgroup strategies, then formulates a hypothesis, develops a strategy for testing it, and arrives at a clear conclusion. The paper really stood out in terms of the use of social science methods - fine-grained quantitative analysis of information meticulously gathered from archival material.

Her case is the treatment of Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki in the inter-war period. As a result of what is euphemistically called the Greek-Turkish exchange of 1924, the Greek state, having expelled its Muslim population, attempted to Christianise public life, including the compulsory closing of shops on Sundays. Among other discriminatory measures, this affected the Sephardic population of Thessaloniki, who had been speaking Ladino since their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula 400 years earlier and who dominated the city. In order to measure the Sephardic reaction, Karmen Misiou has, in a very original way, studied the naming of newborn Sephardic children. She clearly shows that a significant proportion of the shopkeepers reacted by switching from Ladino to Greek and French first names, while their co-religionists did the opposite, preferring Ladino to Hebrew first names. She calls the first reaction assimilation for economic reasons, the second, the opposite, an emphasis on ingroup identity. This is not only an excellent socio-historical study, but also highly relevant to our understanding of assimilation, integration and minority formation in our own time.

Two papers deserve honourable mention:

First, Phoebe Hyun (Harvard University) for her paper "Do you trust me? Formations of trust in first- to fourth-century A.D. Erythraean trade".

This paper asks how the merchants and sailors who plied the seas between the Red Sea and India in the first centuries of our era attempted to manage the immense risks and uncertainties of their enterprises. By examining archaeological evidence from various sites along this route, transmitted in many different languages, Phoebe Hyun shows how trust could be built up through a ritual of leaving inscriptions. This paper clearly shows how even the most remote periods and regions can be relevant for understanding contemporary problems.

Finally, Teresa Petrik (Vienna) for her paper "Negotiating the Boundaries of Work: Survival Strategies and Persecution of the Mobile Lower Classes in the Steyr Region (Upper Austria), c. 1740-1800".

This paper analyses 202 testimonies of people who were caught for what was considered "vagabondage". Teresa Petrik uses modern methods of coding analysis, but above all she takes these narratives as serious information about how the poor had to make a living. Begging was the exceptional strategy between their dominant useful economic occupations. This is clearly a contribution to the history of labour.

We would like to stress that we have also enjoyed reading the other papers, their inventiveness and the hard and serious archival work that has been done. We therefore encourage as many PhD students as possible to participate in the next round in 2027.

Andrea Caracausi, University of Padua 

Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick

Jan Lucassen, International Institute of Social History

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, University of Utrecht

Silke Neunsinger, Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library and Uppsala University

Andrea Peto, Central European University, Vienna