W.J. Stankiewicz was a political philosopher with broad interests in the social sciences and published books on democracy, foreign policy, institutional change in Poland, ideologies, and the importance of political theory. He was a professor at UBC from 1957 until his retirement in 1987. In 1997, Sam LaSelva along with Bogdan Czaykowski published a collection of essays in his honour entitled Holding One’s Time in Thought, and in his honour, Professor Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz established the W.J. Stankiewicz Memorial Graduate Prize in Political Theory to recognize outstanding work in the area of political theory by a graduate student in the Department of Political Science, awarded annually for the best article-length work in the area of political theory. He died in 2006.