Participants

Keynotes Heading link

Darius Staliunas

Who does Vilnius belong to?  Lithuanian, Polish, Jewish, Belarusian, and Russian strategies of symbolic appropriation of a multi-ethnic city

Since 2000 Darius Staliunas has been a deputy director at Lithuanian Institute of History. Staliunas is a member of editorial board of “Ab Imperio”, “Lithuanian Historical Studies,” “Central and East European review, “Lietuvos istorijos metraštis“, „Lietuvos istorijos studijos“, „Nordost-Archiv. Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte“, „Prace Historyczne“, „Studia z Dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej“. He is the author of “Making Russians. Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863.” Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2007. His book “Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-jewish Violence in Lithuanuian under Tsars” is due to be published by CEU Press in 2015. His research interests include issues of Russian nationality policy in the so-called Northwestern Region (Lithuania and Belorussia), ethnic conflicts as well as problems of historiography and places of memory in Lithuania.

Kris van Heuckelom

West, East and Center: The Remapping of Warsaw in European Cinema after 1989

Kris Van Heuckelom teaches Polish language, literature, and culture at KU Leuven (Belgium). His research interests include modern Polish literature, translation studies, visual culture, and film. He co-edited (together with Dieter De Bruyn) the volume (Un)masking Bruno Schulz. New Combinations, Further Fragmentations, Ultimate Reintegrations (New York – Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) and has recently contributed to the multi-authored volume Polish Literature in Transformation (edited by Ursula Phillips with the assistance of Knut Andreas Grimstad & Kris Van Heuckelom, Berlin – Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013). He is the co-editor (together with Leen Engelen) of European Cinema after the Wall. Screening East-West Mobility (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Panels Heading link

Panel 1: For and Against Modernization

Moderator: Beth Holmgren

  • Michał Paweł Markowski, UIC, Life and the City: Polish Modernist Literature Against Modernization
  • Keely Stauter-Halsted, UIC, The Intimate Zones of Urban Life: Sex in the fin-de-siecle Bourgeois Home
  • Michał Wilczewski, UIC, ‘What Happens When an Urbanite Tries to Chop Wood?’: Humor, Romanticism, and the Image of the City in the Rural Imagination, 1914-1939

Panel 2: Warsaw in Time and Space

Moderator: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

  • Roma Sendyka, Jagiellonian University (Poland), Affecting Bodies, Affected City: Warsaw and Sites that Haunt
  • Elżbieta Janicka, (Poland), Festung Warschau: Symbolic Topography of the Former Warsaw Ghetto
  • Karen Underhill, UIC, The Reemergence of Spectral Polin: Reading Sutzkever’s Tzu Poyln at Warsaw’a Museum of the History of Polish Jews
  • Kerry Whigham, New York University, Feeling the Past: A Walk through the World War II Memorials of Berlin 

Panel 3: Łódź

Moderator: Sofia Dyak

  • Winson Chu, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Łódź and the Women Workers’ Strikes in 1971.
  • Agata Zysiak, University of Łódź (Poland)/University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, New Socialist City Divided.  Working class vs intelligentsia struggles over urban identity, democratization of higher education and socialistic university in postwar Łódź.
  • Wiktor Marzec, Central European University (Hungary), Orientalizing Capitalism: City of Łódź as a Discursive Object in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Polish Modernization Debates 

Panel 4: Re-engineering Jewish Landscape

Moderator: Karen Underhill

  • Kamil Kijek, University of Wrocław (Poland), The last Polish shtetl? Jewish communal life and Polsih-Jewish relations in Dzierżoniów 1945-1950
  • Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Northwestern University, Russification and the Transformation/Urbanization of the Polish Town
  • Hanna Kozińska-Witt, Martin Luther University in Halle/Saale (Germany), Center and periphery as an argumnet in discussions about Jewish status in the cities: Cracow and Warsaw in the interwar period

Panel 5: Spectral Cities, Memorial Interventions

Moderator: Colleen McQuillen

  • Sara Feldman, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Yiddish Opera, Russian Culture, and the Jerusalem of Lithuania
  • Sofia Dyak, Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (Ukraine), Moving Objects from Lviv to Wroclaw
  • Karolina Szymaniak, Poland, On Yiddish culture in Lviv/Lemberg

Panel 6: UrbaNation

Moderator: Keely Stauter-Halsted

  • Kathryn Ciancia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Polish Cities, Jewish Cities? Volhynian Urban Spaces and the Construction of the Modern Polish Nation
  • Melissa Hibbard, UIC, Urban Children, Rural Spaces: Child Rescue and the Cultural Politics of Integration, 1915-1920
  • Robert Blobaum, West Virginia University, Warsaw’s Food Catastrophe during the First World War

Panel 7: Beyond Cosmopolitanism

Moderator: Marina Mogilner

  • Nawojka Lesinski, UIC, Warsaw as Multidimensional Space: Local Activism and the Global LGBT Movement
  • Karolina May-Chu, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Visions of Cosmopolitanism in the German-Polish Borderland: The Making of the City of Słubfurt
  • Michael Young, Indiana University, The City Life of Village Music:  Encountering Polish heritage and world music at the 2014 “Rzeczpospolita Kolberga” Wszystkie Mazurki wiata Festival

Panel 8: A View from the Margin

Moderator: Michał Paweł Markowski

  • Jan Balbierz, Jagiellonian University (Poland), The Chronotopes of the City and the Small Town in Wojciech Has’ Visual Narratives
  • Joanna Trzeciak, Kent State University, Mapping the Geography of Witness: A View from the Bench
  • Dag “Sasha” Lindskog, UIC, The Spaces of Insatiability: On the Correlation  between the Urban and the Intoxicatory in Witkacy’s Novel
  • Grażyna Kubica, Jagiellonian University (Poland), Cities–anthropological “non-places”, as reflected upon in the literary texts of Polish anthropologists

Panel 9: Haunted Identities

Moderator: Małogrzata Fidelis

  • Beth Holmgren, Duke University, Warsaw in Print and Performance during World War II
  • Kinga Kosmala, The University of Chicago, “Lady Jane” in Warsaw–Communism Brought Down by Rock’n’roll