Frankee Lyons was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship for her research project What Homeland?: Polish Jewry and the Second Repatriation, 1953-68 at the University of Haifa’s Interdisciplinary Unit for Polish Studies. Her project 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. This research emphasizes both the agency and precarity of migrants as they navigated nationalization, political upheaval, spatial displacement, and cultural exchange in the early Cold War. 

Lyons earned her BA in history from George Washington University and her PhD in modern Eastern European history from the University of Illinois Chicago. Her dissertation, Jewish Belonging on the ‘Polish Road to Socialism:’ Migration and the Re-Making of Polish Jewry, 1956-60, examines perceptions of Jewish belonging in post-Stalinist Poland, focusing on migration policies generated during and after the Polish Thaw from 1953 to the early 1960s. This research was funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, Title VIII Grant Program, Auschwitz Jewish Center, the JDC Archives, and the Kościuszko Foundation.