IU’s Bill Johnston (left) accepted the award from Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, the Polish foreign minister, in a ceremony at the Royal Palace in Warsaw, Poland.
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The Polish Studies Center at IU Bloomington and its director, Bill Johnston, have received the Polish Diploma of the Foreign Ministry for outstanding contributions to the promotion of Poland abroad. Johnston and the center were nominated for the honor by the Polish embassy. A translator of Polish literature, Johnston’s most recent translation is Bacaccay, a short story collection by the late Witold Gombrowicz (Archipelago Books, 2004). He has directed the IU center since 2001.
The annual award, conferred since 1970, honors individuals and institutions that significantly enhance the promotion of Poland in the world.
“This award to the Polish Studies Center and Bill Johnston for promoting knowledge of Poland and things Polish is richly deserved,” said Owen Johnson, the center’s acting director while Johnston is on sabbatical leave. “But the award only tells part of the story. For more than a quarter century, the center, like other area studies centers at IU, has been opening up the rest of the world to IU students and faculty as well as to the people of the state of Indiana.”
The IU Polish Studies Center was established in 1976. Since that time, it has hosted some of the most important figures in Polish politics and culture, including trade unionist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa and the late Czeslaw Milosz, the essayist, poet and critic who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980 and served as a Patten Lecturer on the IU Bloomington campus in the early 1980s.
The center also has sponsored numerous conferences, concerts and theatrical performances and has been instrumental in establishing IU’s academic exchange programs with Warsaw University and with Jagiellonian University in Krakow. These programs have allowed more than 60 IU faculty and graduate students to travel to Poland and an equal number of Polish scholars to come to IU.
http://www.indiana.edu/~polishst/
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