My name is Frankee Lyons, and I am an historian situating postwar Polish Jewish life within global Cold War migration and geopolitical networks.

I earned my PhD in Modern Eastern European History from the University of Illinois Chicago. My dissertation, Jewish Belonging on the ‘Polish Road to Socialism:’ Migration and the Re-Making of Polish Jewry, 1956-60 examines Jewish experiences of the Polish Thaw and new migration policies generated between 1953 and the early 1960s. This project highlights Jewish voices ‘from-below’ that rose to the surface during the Polish Thaw, recovering the vibrancy of the postwar Jewish minority in Poland and its hopeful visions of the future during the Thaw’s moment of liberalization. My research was funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Title VIII Grant Program, Auschwitz Jewish Center, the JDC Archives, and the Kościuszko Foundation. My dissertation received the UIC Department of History’s 2024 Leo Schelbert Dissertation Prize, awarded to the best dissertation defended in that academic year.

I am currently a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, where I am developing my monograph tentatively entitled What Homeland? Jews and the Second Repatriation, 1953-1968. This book traces the stories of Jewish migrants in the post-Stalinist period, following their journeys from the Soviet Union through Poland to Western and Southern Europe and Israel. My research emphasizes both the agency and precarity of migrants as they navigated nationalisms, political upheaval, spatial displacement, and cultural exchange in the early Cold War.