Speaker Bios  

Andrew Asher is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include citizenship, migration, and transnational governance within the European Union. He is currently completing a dissertation examining emergent forms of transnational citizenship in the Polish-German border regions based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2005-2006 in Frankfurt an-der-Oder, Germany and Słubice, Poland.

Angelika Bammer is an associate professor in The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. She is the author of Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (Routledge, 1991), the editor of Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Indiana, 1994), and has published widely in the fields of contemporary German and Cultural Studies, history and memory, and literature and film. She is completing a book on the intersection of personal narrative and public history and a critical study of the work of memory in the aftermath of difficult pasts.

Justyna Beinek is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, Bloomington. A native of Wrocław, Poland, she earned her Ph.D. in Russian and Polish Literatures at Harvard University (2001), worked as a business consultant for McKinsey&Company in Poland, and taught at New York University and the University of Toronto. She is currently completing her book, The Album in the Age of Russian and Polish Romanticism: Memory, Nation, Authorship, and is co-editing A Critical Guidebook to Witold Gombrowicz. Her interests also include the idea of the “West” in Slavic cultures and literary/visual representations of the body.

Jack Bielasiak is a professor of political science at Indiana University, specializing in the transformation of communist societies and global transitions to democracy.  His work has focused on political participation (for example, articles in American Political Science Review and International Journal of Politics), on the political crisis in Poland (books Poland Today and Polish Politics: Edge of the Abyss), and on electoral and party systems (for example, articles in Comparative Politics, Party Politics, and Democratization).  Another distinct area of interest concerns political violence and ethnic conflict, especially the politics of genocide.

Claudia Breger is an associate professor of Germanic Studies and an adjunct associate professor of Communication and Culture and Gender Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research and teaching focus on 20th- and 21st-century literature, film, and culture, with a particular emphasis on the interrelations of gender, sexuality, and race, as well as literary, media, and cultural theory.

Fritz Breithaupt (Indiana University) works on German and European literature and intellectual history since the eighteenth century. He has published on the history of the self, money, aesthetics, trauma, media coverage of 9/11, Rousseau, Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, Keller, and Celan. He just completed his second book, The Ego-Effect of Money.

Maria Bucur’s research and teaching interests focus on European history in the modern period, especially social and cultural developments in Eastern Europe. She is currently writing a book entitled The Violence of Memory and Memory of Violence on the Edge of Europe, focusing onhow various local communities and official state institutions in Eastern Europe have tried to engineer the past, by constructing representations of wartime violence through monuments and commemorative processes.

Darcy Buerkle is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her primary research focus is German Jewish women’s history in the early twentieth century and related historiographic questions of history and memory. She has published several articles in the field. She is presently completing her book manuscript entitled Visual Rhetoric of Suicide: German Jewish Women and Spectatorship in Early Twentieth Century Germany.

Winson W. Chu completed his dissertation German Political Organizations and Regional Particularisms in Interwar Poland (1918-1939) in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. He has contributed to German and American publications and participated in international conferences. He has received support from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Foreign Languages and Area Studies program.

Przemysław Czapliński is a professor in the Department of the Anthropology of Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His fields of activity include the history of polish modern and postmodern literature, the history of ideas, the history of literary criticism, and the sociology and anthropology of literature. He is the author of ten books, most recently The Return of Center: Polish Literature in the New Reality (Kraków, 2007), and also the co-author of three books, among them The Calendar of Polish Literary Life 1976-2000. He edited the volumes Boredom in Culture (1997), Reading Herbert (1995), and Normality and Conflicts (2006) and organized four interdisciplinary conferences, most recently Holocaust: Contemporary Problems of Understanding and Representing.

Maximilian Eiden received his M.A. in Modern History and Polish Philology (summa
cum laude) from Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany in 2004. His thesis was on Max Berg’s Centenary Hall in Breslau/Wrocław and the surrounding exhibition sites as a “lieu de mémoire” for Germans and Poles. He is currently working on a doctorate dissertation on the Silesian Piast dynasty as a subject of historiography, art and politics (1675–today). His research interests include East-Central European politics and culture, especially literature and regions of the Habsburg monarchy. He has published on memory theory, Polish-German cultural relations, and regional history, including translations, editorial work, press articles, and conference papers.

Petra Fachinger is an associate professor in the German Department at Queen’s University, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of British Columbia (thesis title: “Counter-Discursive Strategies in First-World Migrant Writing”). Fachinger is the author of Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s as well as several articles on transnational literature in English and in German. She is co-editor of the Special Seminar Issue “Poland in Postwar German Literature and Culture,” to be published in 2008.

Annika Frieberg is completing her dissertation, Networking across Borders: Correspondents and Catholic Intellectuals in Polish-German Reconciliation, 1956-1972, in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her article, “Geopolitics and New Germans: Stanisław Stomma’s National Myths and Mythical Realities, 1956-1968,” was published in 2006 by the Herder-Institut, Marburg, Germany. Originally from Sweden, she has spent the past nine years in the United States, Germany, and Poland, and now lives in Boston.

Aleksandra Galasińska (Ph.D., Kraków) is a research fellow in European Studies at the History and Governance Research Institute, University of Wolverhampton, Great Britain. Her main research interests focus on ethnographic and discursive aspects of lived experience of post-communism. Her research has been published in Narrative Inquiry, Multilingua, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnicities, and Discourse & Society. She is currently co-editing two contracted volumes for Palgrave and for John Benjamins regarding public and private post-communist discourses.

Hanna Gosk is a professor of Polish Literature in the Department of Polish Philology at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Since 2006 she has been the Chair of Section for Anthropological Issues in Literature. She is a member of the International Institute for Hermeneutics, St Mark’s College, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (since 2001). Her areas of expertise include contemporary Polish prose and criticism. She recently published the books Bohater swoich czasów. Postać literacka w powojennej prozie polskiej o tematyce współczesnej (2002) and Zamiast końca historii. Rozumienie oraz prezentacja procesu historycznego w polskiej prozie XX i XXI wieku podejmującej tematy współczesne (2005).[Heroes of Their Times. Literary Character in Polish Prose with Contemporary Thematic Concerns], [Instead of the End of History. An Understanding and Representation of Historical Process in Polish 20th and 21st Century Prose Addressing Contemporary Issues.]

Irena Grudzińska Gross is the executive director of the Institute for Human Sciences and professor of Modern Foreign Languages at Boston University. A graduate of Columbia University (1982), she taught at the Graduate Institute of Liberal Studies at Emory University and the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Magnetic Field (Kraków) and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, which appeared in four languages. She edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and is the author of over 40 book chapters and articles published on these subjects in the international press and periodicals. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation.

Stefan Guth studied History and Slavonic Languages at the Universities of Berne, Fribourg and Zurich. He is a doctoral candidate and assistant lecturer at the chair of Prof. Dr. Marina Cattaruzza in Berne, Switzerland. His research interests focus on aspects of intellectual history in Central and Eastern Europe, in particular German–Polish historiographical relations in the 20th century and the perception of Fascism and National Socialism in interwar Poland. He has published several articles on historioraphical topics, including “Between Confrontation and Conciliation. German–Polish Historiographical Relations in the 1930s,” which appeared in Storia della Storiografia. History of Historiography 47 (2005).

Imke Hansen is a lecturer in East European History and a doctoral candidate in History at Hamburg University, Germany. She specializes in Belarusian, Polish, and East European Jewish History; the theory of Identity and Nationalism; and Oral History. Her current research focus is on conceptions of identity and nation in Belarus. She conducts interviews for international oral history projects on the Holocaust (Yale University, Hagen University in Germany) and leads study groups at the Auschwitz Museum on the past and present of Auschwitz. She received her M.A. in Political Science at Hamburg University in 2004, and was an assistant professor of Political Science at Belarusian State University in Minsk from 2004 to 2005.

Mateusz Józef Hartwich studied Cultural and Social Science at the Viadrina European University Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. Since 2007, he has been a scholar at the Berlin School for Comparative European History. He works in the field of Polish-German relations, tourism history, and the role of the past in contemporary Poland. He is the author of several articles in German and Polish journals and is the founder and member of several initiatives. He currently also works as a freelance translator, project manager, and tour guide.

Heidi Hein-Kircher Dr. phil. has been on the research staff of the Herder-Institute in Marburg, Germany since 2003 and has held lectureship positions in Eastern European history at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf since 1996, and at the Philipps-University in Marburg since 2004. In both 1995-96 and 2002-03, she was a fellow at German Historical Institute in Warsaw. In her research, she focuses on Polish history of the 19th and 20th centuries, political and cultural myths, Lemberg (L’viv) in the 19th century, Piłsudski, and the history of the Jews in East Central Europe. She is the author of Der Piłsudski-Kult und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat 1926 – 1939 [The Piłsudski Cult and its Importance for the Polish State, 1926-1939] (2002), and co-editor (with Hans Henning Hahn) of Politische Mythen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert in Mittel und Osteuropa [Political Myths in the 19th and 20th centuries in Central and Eastern Europe] (2006).

Wanda Jarząbek works in the German Studies Department at the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. She is the co-editor of the Polish - German Yearbook. Her research concentrates on international relations after the Second World War and the Cold War with special focus on the German Question and Polish-German political relations and social contacts. She is now working on her habilitation: “Polish reactions to German Ostpolitik.” She teaches at the Warsaw University and at Collegium Civitas.

Bill Johnston is the director of Indiana University’s Polish Studies Center and an associate professor of Comparative Literature and Second Language Studies. He is primarily known as a translator of Polish literature; his recent translations include Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay, Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones (which won the AATSEEL Translation Prize in 2005), Tadeusz Różewicz’s New Poems, and Andrzej Stasiuk’s Nine.

Bożena Karwowska is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. Canada. She teaches courses in Russian and Polish languages and literatures in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies. Her fields of interest include reader response criticism and the literary representation of women in Slavic literatures (especially Russian and Polish). She published articles in Teksty Drugie, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Przegląd Humanistyczny and Ruch Literacki. Her book Recepcja krytyczna Czesława Miłosza and Josifa Brodskiego w krajach języka angielskiego was published in 2000. She is currently working on two projects: “Exile in Polish Women’s Prose” and “Sexuality—Body and Gender in Nazi Concentration Camps.”

Kristin Kopp is an assistant professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she teaches courses on German literature, contemporary German film, and cultural issues surrounding immigration to Germany. Her current research projects include a monograph on the German construction of Poland as colonial space, 1848-1945; as well as articles on Hans-Christian Schmid’s German-Polish border film Lichter (Distant Lights, 2003), and on the discovery of Poland as filmic space in contemporary German cinema.

Marta Kurkowska-Budzan (Ph.D, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 2001) is a lecturer at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. Her fields of interest include methodology of history, sociology of historical knowledge, Holocaust representations, oral history, and social memory of World War II. She has been a fellow at the Remarque Institute, NYU and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is the author of History of the People: English Social Historiography (2003).

Jessie Labov is a postdoctoral fellow in Comparative Literature at Stanford, where she teaches courses on 20th century European film and literature. Her work focuses on the idea of Central Europe and its circulation in the form of samizdat and tamizdat. She has also written on issues of emigration and exile in European literature and film, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, Polish gangster films of the 1990s, and the Leksikon Yu Mitologije, an encyclopedia of Yugoslav popular culture.

Erica Lehrer is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. U. Michigan, 2005) and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. In fall 2007 she will begin as assistant professor in the history department at Concordia University in Montreal. She is at work on a book titled Remaking Memory: How Jews and Poles are Salvaging Jewish Heritage in Poland (and reconceiving national belonging along the way) based on ethnographic fieldwork in Poland, Israel, and the United States.

Christian Lotz received his M.A. degree in History and Social Sciences from the University of Leipzig, Germany in 2003, after studying in Leipzig, Edinburgh, Vienna, and Poznań. In 2003 he was an assistant lecturer at the Willy-Brandt-Center for German and European Studies in Wrocław. He is a member of the Leipziger Kreis—Forum für Wissenschaft und Kunst in Germany. He is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation, Expulsion and the politics of memory. Debates about the expulsion of Germans after World War II in divided Germany (1948-1972).

Paweł Lutomski has a Ph.D. in German Studies, as well as a J.D. He teaches in the International Relations Program at Stanford and in the Politics Department at the University of San Francisco. His subject areas are international law and international relations, forced migrations, and German-Polish relations. He is co-editor of a volume entitled Population Resettlement in International Conflicts: A Comparative Study, scheduled for publication with Rowman & Littlefield in May 2007.

Magdalena Marszałek studied Slavic literatures and languages, theatre, film, and TV studies in Kraków, Poland and Bochum, Germany. From 1998 to 2006, she was an assistant at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Free University of Berlin. She is curently an assistant professor of Polish literature at the Slavic Department of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her Ph.D. thesis was on the autobiographical writing of Zofia Nałkowska. Her current research includes projects on literature and geography (geopoetics) and memory and arts (collective memory in East Central Europe after 1989).

Michael Meng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation currently in progress, From Destruction to Preservation: Jewish Sites in Germany and Poland after the Holocaust‚ examines the postwar history of Jewish spaces from 1945 to the present. His publications include articles in Central European History, Contemporary European History, and a book chapter in Beyond Berlin: German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Michigan, 2008) edited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot. He has received support from Fulbright, the German Marshall Fund, ACLS, DAAD, and the GSA Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.

Ania Muller is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Indiana University. She holds a Master of Arts in History from Gdańsk University, Poland. Her dissertation research focuses on women’s involvement in the resistance movements of Eastern Europe.

Rob Nelson completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge University in 2003. A major theme of this dissertation on the German soldier newspapers of the First World War was the representation of occupied Eastern European populations. His new project explores the German program of inner colonization in Prussian Poland, including the transportation of the frontier colonial gaze from the North American West, to the German East, in the late 19th Century. He is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Joanna Niżyńska is an assistant professor of Polish literature in the Slavic Department of Harvard University. She teaches primarily contemporary Polish literature in the context of theoretical and comparative studies. Her research interests focus on the intersection of memory, the traumatic, and the everyday—issues she engages in her current work on Miron Białoszewski. Her works include articles on Ovid and Zbigniew Herbert and Frank O’Hara and post-1989 Polish poetry.

David Pickus is a senior lecturer at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in German Intellectual History in 1995 from the University of Chicago. His book, Dying with an Enlightening Fall: Poland in the Eyes of German Intellectuals, 1764-1800, was published by Lexington Books in 2001. His current research is on German-Jewish intellectual refugees in America. He plans to begin a project on Philo-Semitism in Serbia and Yugoslavia.

Mark Roseman is Pat M. Glazer Chair for Jewish Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of A Past in Hiding. Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany and The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting, a study of the Wannsee Conference. He has published widely on other aspects of the history of the Holocaust and modern German history, including most recently German History from Margins, co-edited with Neil Gregor and Nils Roemer, and Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity, co-edited with Frank Biess and Hanna Schissler.

Beate Sissenich (Cornell Ph.D., 2003) is assistant professor in Indiana University’s Department of Political Science. She studies regional integration with a focus on the European Union and its eastward enlargement and is interested in how international and domestic politics interact. Her book Building States without Society (Lexington 2007) examines the transfer of EU social policy to Poland and Hungary. Her current projects deal with mechanisms of rule convergence and divergence, network governance in the European Union, and transnational contentious politics.

Barbara Skinner (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is an assistant professor of history at Indiana State University. She studies religion and identity in the Russian Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, particularly in the Polish-Russian borderlands. Her current project is a book on the process and impact of the conversion of Uniates in the Russian Empire.

Regina Smyth (Ph.D. Duke University) studies transition politics, specializing in post-Communist cases. Her recent book, Candidate Strategies and Electoral Competition in the Russian Federation: Democracy without Foundation (Cambridge 2006), explores the relationship between elections and democratic development in transitional systems. A second project explores the internal development of Russia’s political party system. The results of this project appear in Politics and Society, Comparative Politics, and Comparative Political Studies and edited volumes. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her current work examines party relevance in elections and legislative decision-making in post-Communist states. Prior to joining the faculty at Indiana University, Smyth taught at Penn State University.

Joanna Kędzierska Stimmel teaches German language and culture at Middlebury College. She has a Master’s degree from Łódź University and a Ph.D. in German from Georgetown University. Her doctoral research focused on mutual representations and self-images in recent German and Polish literature, press, and film dealing with the Holocaust, and she is currently working on a book about spatial aspects of memory and their representation in literary texts in both countries.

Gregor Thum is a historian and DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. from Europa Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) in 2002. His first book on the postwar cultural history of Wrocław, Die fremde Stadt. Breslau 1945 (Berlin: Siedler), was published in 2003, the Polish translation of which came out in 2006. Currently he is working on a history of the so called “German East.”

Bryoni Trezise is in the final stages of her Ph.D. in the School of English, Media, and Performance at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. With a working title of “Performing Postmemories,” her dissertation investigates autobiographical and memorial practices as sites of critical cultural rupture. She also works as a dramaturg, writer and facilitating artist for PACT Youth Theatre across a range of community and performance projects.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is an associate professor of History and Jewish Studies and an associate director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. His first book, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, won a National Jewish Book Award and the Barnard Hewitt Award. He is currently completing his second book, entitled The Jews of This World: Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire.

Timothy Waters is an associate professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington. His research focuses on law and ethnic conflict, and especially on redefining the right of self-determination to allow peaceable secession. Forthcoming works include Remembering Sudetenland: On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing (Virginia Journal of International Law) and The Blessing of Departure: Exchange of Populated Territories as an Exercise in Demographic Transformation (Ramat Gan University). His work is available online at SSRN (http://ssrn.com/author=476025).

Margaret Wojtunik-Maliszewska received her M.A. in German Studies from the University of Toronto, Canada and from Maria-Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the German Department at Queen’s University and is writing her dissertation about the journey to Poland in contemporary German texts by women.

Marek Zaleski is a literary crictic and an associate professor at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Poland. He is the deputy editor of Res Rublica Nowa (quarterly) and the author of books Przygoda drugiej awangardy (1984), Mądremu biada? Szkice literackie (1990), Formy pamięci (1996), and Zamiast. O twórczości Czesława Miłosza (2006). He is a member of Polish PEN-Club and Polish Writers Association.