Dr. Stanislav Pejša receives 2025 CLA Distinguished Dissertation Award

Dr. Stanislav Pejša, a recent PhD graduate from the Department of History, was awarded the 2025 College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Dissertation Award.

 Dr. Pejša also holds MA degrees in history from Charles University in Prague (the Czech Republic) and Central European University in Budapest (Hungary), as well as MLIS from Rutgers, New Brunswick. After a brief career in newspapers, Dr. Pejša worked in archives and libraries in New York City helping to build comprehensive digital collections from archival materials. His interests in research workflows and data preservation brought Dr. Pejša to work with research data at Purdue. Shortly thereafter, the opportunities offered by the digital humanities lured him back to historical research and the doctoral program there.

Stanislav Pejša's dissertation, titled "Determining People, Reordering Places. Visions of Transformations of the Postwar World, 1916-1920," explores the vocabularies and imaginaries of the postwar world order during the First World War. It investigates the role of academic experts and intellectuals mobilized by the Allied governments to bring forth a new and viable organization of international relations. The quantitative methods, primarily those used in the text analysis, were essential for understanding thinking, rhetoric, and vocabularies of those who shaped the new world order at the Paris Peace Conference in Paris in 1919.

This story was originally published on the College of Liberal Arts Awards website. You can view all awards at this link.