The Jacobs School of Music Department of Musicology is proud to announce that Dr. Nicolette van den Bogerd (Ph.D., 2024), currently a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington, has been awarded the 2024 Graduate Essay Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS).
Dr. van den Bogerd’s winning essay is a chapter from her recently defended dissertation, “Writing Music After the Holocaust: Survivor Identity and Memory in the Works of Polish Jewish Composers.” Her essay, titled “Szymon Laks’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’: Post-Holocaust Testimonies to Polish Jewish History,” offers an analysis of Laks’s art song “Elegia żydowskich miasteczek” (“Elegy of Jewish Towns”) in the context of his postwar writings; van den Bogerd argues that the song serves as a “testimonial site,” where memory, history, and forgetting are negotiated.
The essay combines musicological and Jewish studies perspectives to explore how Laks’s composition engages in an “imaginary musical conversation” with the poem by Antoni Słonimski. This conversation, van den Bogerd demonstrates, challenges Polish mythologizing of Jewish history after World War II, offering a critique of postwar Polish attitudes toward Jews and the Holocaust. The AWSS committee praised her essay for its clarity, depth of research, and compelling analysis, highlighting how it contributes to broader conversations about memory and identity in post-Holocaust music.
The 2024 Graduate Essay Prize Committee consisted of Dr. Melissa Bokovoy, Dr. Yelena Furman, and Dr. Jessica Zychowicz.
Congratulations Dr. van den Bogerd!
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