Participants

Natalia Aleksiun is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She received two doctoral degrees: from the University of Warsaw and NYU. She was a fellow at Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and Senior Fellow at Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Vienna, a Yad Hanadiv Postdoctoral Fellow in Israel and Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow, The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM, Washington D.C. She published a monograph titled Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 (in Polish), and numerous articles in Yad Vashem Studies, Polish Review, Dapim, East European Jewish Affairs, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Polin, Gal Ed, East European Societies and Politics, Nashim and German History. Her book titled “Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust” will be published with Littman in 2017. She is currently working on a new book about the so-called cadaver affair at European Universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust.

Małgorzata Bakałarz Duverger is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York. Holding degrees in art history and sociology, she develops her academic interests around the realms of word and image: her research focuses on discourse and space analysis, visual culture, narratives of dis/placements, and politics (and distortion) of memory.

Tomasz Bierkowski is a typographer, graphic designer, critic of design and professor at Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, where he works with BA, MA and Ph.D. students. He is head of Typography Studio and head of the program. He specializes in editorial design and visual identity. Author of a book „On typography” and articles focusing on typography and visual communication published in professional and scientific magazines.

Anna Bikont is a non-fiction writer and journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza, the main newspaper in Poland which she helped found in 1989. In 2011 she received the European Book Prize for he French version of her book “My z Jedwabnego”. In 2015 the English version, The Crime and the Silence. Confronting the Massacre of the Jews in wartime Jedwabne, published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, was selected in the 100 Notable Books of the Year by New York Times and won one of the National Jewish Book Awards.

Jonathan Brent (Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 1980) became the Executive Director of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City in 2009. From 1991 to2009 he was an editor and then both Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale University Press. He is the founder of the acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. In 1981 he founded the international literary magazine, FORMATIONS, that specialized in work from Eastern Europe and Russia. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and author of Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008. He is now working on a biographical study of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent is visiting professor history and literature at Bard College.

Laura Brown is Co-founder and Director of Handshouse Studio, Inc. and faculty of sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She earned a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a MFA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Laura has been awarded the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Lillian Heller’s Curator’s Award, Massachusetts College of Art Center for Arts and Community Partnership Grant, Visible Republic Planning Grant, Helen Blair Crosby Sculpture Award, Dondis A. Dondis Travel Fellowship and Ford Foundation Grant.

Rick Brown is Co-Founder and President of Handshouse Studio, Inc. He is a Professor of Sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He received a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Master of Fine Arts from Washington University School of Fine Arts, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia. Rick is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright Scholars Research Grant to Poland, University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art: Wilson Center Visiting Scholar Program Grant, Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Award of Distinction, Sam Fox School of Washington University, Lillian Heller’s Curator’s Award, Massachusetts College of Art Center for Arts and Community Partnership Grant, ­Davis Foundation Grant through the Colleges of the Fenway, Massachusetts Artists Foundation Finalists Grant for Sculpture, Massachusetts Artists Foundation Finalists Grant for Environmental Design, National Endowment for the Arts Funding for Sculpture Installation (Decordova Museum Lincoln, MA), a Ford Foundation Grant, the Goldsmith Award, Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, TN, and recently the 2015 Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association (CAA).

Andrzej Brylak is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literature Department. He graduated from Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. As a freelance journalist he wrote on issues such as, Revolution in Ukraine, Israeli Literature, and independent journalism in Belarus for titles like Znak Monthly and Krytyka Polityczna. He is a Graduate of Mi Dor Le Dor Jewish heritage educators and leadership-training program. He worked as an educator and researcher at Taube Center for Jewish Life Renewal in Poland. His academic interest include: Polish Literature in Israel, dynamics between Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian Literatures and identities, Contemporary Jewish writing, and Postcolonial Theory.

Marc Caplan is a native of Louisiana and a graduate of Yale University. Since receiving his PhD in comparative literature at New York University in 2003 he has held appointments at Indiana University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Center for Jewish History in New York. In 2011 he published How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms—a comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature with the postcolonial African novel—with Stanford University Press. Currently he is a research fellow at the University of Michigan, where he is completing a second book on Yiddish literature in Weimar-era Berlin.

Julie E. Cooper is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Political Science Department at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests include the history of political theory; early modern political theory (especially Hobbes and Spinoza); secularism and secularization; Jewish political thought; and modern Jewish thought. She is the author of Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (Chicago, 2013). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Review of Politics, The Historical Journal, Political Theory, Jewish Quarterly Review, and the Annual Review of Political Science. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled Politics Without Sovereignty? Exile, State, and Territory in Jewish Thought, that examines modern attempts to reimagine and rehabilitate Judaism’s national and political dimensions.

Krzysztof Czyżewski is a practitioner of ideas, writer, philosopher, culture animator, theatre director, editor. He is a co-founder and president of the Borderland Foundation (1990) and director of the Centre “Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations” in Sejny. Among his books of poetry and essays are: The Path of the Borderland (2001), Line of Return (2008), Trust & Identity: A Handbook of Dialog (2011), Miłosz – Dialog – Borderland (2013) and Miłosz. A Connective Tissue (2014). He coordinates intercultural dialogue programs in Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia, Indonesia, Bhutan and USA. From 2015 he is a visiting professor of Rutgers University and University of Bologna. His recent theatre productions include “Three Women. Metamorphosis of the Medea’s Myth in Ovid and Picasso” (2014) and “The Mystery of the Bridge” (2015). For more information on the Borderlands Fundation please visit: pogranicze.sejny.pl/?lang=en

Irena Grudzińska – Gross is a Research Scholar at Princeton University, she teaches East European literature and history. Her books include a volume of essays “Honor, Horror and Classics,” “Golden Harvest” (with Jan T. Gross),”Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets,” and “The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination.” She has also edited several books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe, and is the author of numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects published in the international press and periodicals. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation.

Beth Holmgren is Professor of Polish and Russian cultures in Duke University’s Slavic and Eurasian Studies Department; she holds secondary appointments in Theater Studies and Women’s Studies. She taught previously at University of California-San Diego and UNC-Chapel Hill, and spent far too many years as department chair. Holmgren served as president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2008, and president of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies from 2003-2005. Recent books include the cultural biography, Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America (Indiana, 2012), which won four national awards, and Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present, edited with Choi Chatterjee (Routledge, 2013). An anthology titled Transgressive Women in Russian and East European Cultures: From the Bad to the Blasphemous, co-edited with Yana Hashamova and Mark Lipovetsky, is due out with Routledge in late 2016. Holmgren is currently working on two projects — a biography of a young Jewish woman who fought in the Warsaw Uprising; and How the Cabaret Went to War, a book about the experience and reception of acculturated Jewish cabaret artists traveling with the Polish II Corps, or Anders Army, during World War II.

Agnieszka Jeżyk is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures Department. She graduated from Journalism and Polish Literature and Culture at the Jagiellonian University, where she was a recipient of the Scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education. For couple of years she used to work as a freelance journalist, editor and PR specialist, working for institutions such as Onet.pl, SIW Znak and Universitas Publishing Houses. She initiated and organized three graduate students conferences in Poland and US and participated and co-organized numerous others. Her academic interests revolve around issues such as love and erotic discourse, masculinities and femininities, body and corporeal experience in modernist and contemporary culture, everyday life under socialism (with the emphasis on fashion and music) and Polish-Jewish and Polish Avant-Gardes of the interwar period.

Daniel Kahn is Detroit-born, Berlin-based since 2005, frontman of the punk-folk-klezmer band The Painted Bird, and is a founding member of The Unternationale, The Brothers Nazaroff, The Disorientalists, and Semer Ensemble. He tours the world as a singer, songwriter, translator, and teacher, collaborating with the best of the Yiddish cultural revival, as well as the international folk scene. At Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater he works as a director/playwright (Genghis Cohn), composer/actor (Enemies: A Love Story), and music curator. In fall of 2015, he played Biff in Castillo Theater’s critically-acclaimed off-Broadway Toyt fun a Salesman (Death of a Salesman in Yiddish) in New York.

Mikhail Krutikov is a professor of Slavic and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Ph. D. in Jewish Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary (1998); he is the author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 (Stanford UP, 2001) and From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford UP, 2011), and co-editor of 9 collections on Yiddish culture published by Legenda Press, Oxford. Krutikov is a cultural columnist for the Yiddish Forward.

Jessie Labov is Associate Professor in Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State, where she teaches courses on comparative Central and Southeastern European literature and culture. Her research concerns cross-border transfer of texts in a variety of settings, with a focus on Cold War culture, underground and émigré literature, and film. Her co-edited volume, Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism, came out in 2013 with Berghahn and her monograph, Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography Beyond the Nation, will be published by CEU press this fall.

Andrzej Leder is a philosopher and philosophical essayist. He specializes in contemporary continental philosophy, especially political philosophy and philosophy of culture. He has published books in Polish, whose titles in English are Unconsciousness Seen as the Void (2001), The Teaching of Freud in the Time of Sein und Zeit (2007), the last, concerned with the memory of the XXth century in Poland, The Overdreamed Revolution. Exercise in historical Logics. (2014) and two collections of philosophical essays, awarded a literary prize in 2004, available in 2013 in English as The Changing Guise of Myths. Member of the advisory board of Institut Levinas in Paris, member of Husserl Circle. Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Agi Legutko specializes in modern Yiddish literature, language, and culture, women and gender studies, spirit possession in Judaism, as well as in American and European modern Jewish literature, theater, and film. Her research interests also include trauma, memory, performance, and the body represented in modern Jewish culture. She is interested in exploring the possibilities offered by digital humanities in Yiddish language instruction and is an advocate of integrating technology in the classroom. She received her Ph.D. (2012, with distinction), M.Phil (2008), and M.A. (2006) in Yiddish studies from Columbia University, and her M.A. (2002) in English Language and Literature and Translation Studies from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Before joining Columbia University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Maryland. She is currently focusing on creating an online database of Yiddish teaching materials and is working on turning her dissertation into a book that explores the trope of dybbuk possession in twentieth-century Jewish literature and performing arts. Her publications include Krakow’s Kazimierz: Town of Partings and Returns, a historical guidebook to the Jewish Quarter of Krakow (in English and Polish 2004, 2009), and articles on dybbuk possession in modern Jewish literature and on Yiddish poetry, such as “Feminist Dybbuks: Spirit Possession Motif in Post-Second Wave Jewish Women’s Fiction” (Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Spring 2010) and “‘The Circus Lady:’ Gender Poetry of Celia Dropkin” in Joanna Lisek (ed.), Silent Souls? Women in Yiddish Culture, (Wroclaw University Press, 2010).

Erica Lehrer is a socio cultural anthropologist and curator. She is currently Associate Professor in the departments of History and Sociology Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Museum & Heritage Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of publications including Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press 2013), editor (with Michael Meng) of Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015), and in 2013 curated the exhibit Souvenir, Talisman, Toy at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, and in 2014 published the accompanying book Lucky Jews and the online exhibit www.luckyjews.com.

Richard Levy teaches a variety of courses on modern German history, 1740-1945, and on the history of the Holocaust. His writing has gradually expanded from analysis of German antisemitism before World War I to the study of antisemitism worldwide, treating the subject in its cultural context and examining its function in politics and society. He has edited the two-volume Antisemitism: Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio Press, 2005) and, most recently, an anthology for Oxford University Press, Antisemitism: A History (2010). He also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 1994 to 2013.

Michał Paweł Markowski is the Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Slavic Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a tenured visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, which he founded in 2007, at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He taught at Harvard (2002), Northwestern (2003), and Brown (2009), and in 2008 he was a senior researcher at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. Since 1997 he has published more than 30 volumes of individual books, editions, and translations on literature and philosophy, and over 400 essays, articles, and columns in professional journals, cultural monthlies, weeklies, and newspapers. Markowski has authored monographs on Derrida, Nietzsche, Gombrowicz, Schulz, and Polish Modern literature. As a translator, he has brought into Polish works by Proust, Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Rorty, and Perec. Since 2008 he has been the Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Festival of Literature in Kraków, Poland, widely regarded amongst as one of the most important European literary festivals.

Konrad Matyjaszek works in the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he is a researcher and an editorial secretary / co-editor of Studia Litteraria et Historica, an interdisciplinary journal. His work is located at the interface of architectural theory and cultural studies; his research looks at discursive and spatial processes that define the construction of a minority place in the Polish public sphere. His recent research project is focused on urban and cultural processes of production of Jewish spaces in contemporary Warsaw.

Kenneth Moss is a Director of the Jewish Studies Program and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He studies modern Jewish history with a particular interest in the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Jews in 19th and 20th century Russia, Poland, interwar Palestine, and Israel. His primary interests include the history of Jewish social and political thinking in the 20th century, particularly Jewish conceptions of the state, capitalism, nation, and race between the two world wars; the history and sociology of Jewish nationalism; Yiddish and Hebrew culture and the Jewish encounter with ideas of secular culture and aesthetic culture; theory and practice of cultural history. He is currently working on a book entitled The Unchosen People: the Polish Jewish Condition and the Jewish Political Imagination, 1928-1939.

Bożena Nowicka McLees is a Polish language and literature instructor and Director of Interdisciplinary Polish Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She earned her M.A. in Polish Language and Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ms. McLees is experienced in teaching and developing Polish language, literature and culture curriculum. In addition to her work at Loyola, she has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Harper College. Ms. McLees has focused on connecting the evolving academic programs in Poland with the existing network of schools, educational institutions and Polish American organizations in Chicago, to promote interest and understanding of Polish culture as well as the acquisition and maintenance of heritage language skills. She has collaborated with Poland’s State Commission in providing examination for the Certification of Proficiency in Polish as Foreign Language and with the Chicago’s Sister City Warsaw Committee in leading the Educational Exchange Subcommittee. She was a co-founder and Board Member of the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, 2012-2015, and a co-founder of the Polish Film Festival in America in 1988.

Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, professor at the Department of Literary Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University. She specializes in the history of modern literature and literary criticism, literary ethnology, literary nationalism, Polish-Jewish literature and Polish-Jewish cultural and literary contacts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Polish-Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years (2003; Polish version Międzywojenna literatura polsko-żydowska jako zjawisko kulturowe i artystyczne, 1992), Pogranicze polsko-żydowskie. Topografie i teksty [Polish-Jewish Frontier. Topographies and Texts] (2013), Literatura i nacjonalizm [Literature and Nationalism] (2004), an editor of the anthology Międzywojenna poezja polsko-żydowska [Interwar Polish-Jewish Poetry] (1996), coeditor of Teatr żydowski w Krakowie [Jewish Theater in Cracow] (1995), Literatura polsko-żydowska. Studia i szkice [Polish-Jewish Literature Studies and Essays] (2011), Polskie tematy i konteksty literatury żydowskiej [Polish Themes and Contexts of Jewish Literature] (2014), Polacy- Żydzi: kontakty kulturowe i literackie [Poles – Jews: Cultural and Literary Contacts] (2014), Twarzą ku nocy. Twórczość literacka Maurycego Szymla [Facing a Night. Literary Output by Mayrycy Szymel] (2015), and contributor to the scholarly journals and collective volumes in Poland, England, Germany, Rumania, USA, and Israel.

Shana Penn is executive director of Taube Philanthropies, in San Francisco, and a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union’s Center for Jewish Studies, in Berkeley. Her books include Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (University of Michigan Press, 2005); Gender Politics and Everyday Life in Eastern and Central Europe, co-edited with Jill Massino (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Sekret Solidarności (W.A.B. Publishers, 2014).

Andrzej Rojek is a Board Chairman of Jan Karski Educational Foundation. He has been active in global finance since 1986. He has recently retired as the Managing Director at Advent Capital Management. Previously, Andrzej Rojek was one of the founders of Lydian Asset Management, the global hedge fund, established in 1999, and focused on convertible bonds and relative value credit investments. Mr. Rojek served as a managing director and partner at Bankers Trust and also with the convertibles groups at Merrill Lynch. A US citizen who was born in Poland in 1956, Mr. Rojek graduated with honors from the University of Warsaw in 1979 with a degree in economics. He received his master’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1985. Andrzej Rojek serves presently as a trustee of the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York , Packer Collegiate Institute in New York as well as member of the investment committee of Mount Holyoke College. He is involved in numerous charitable initiatives in Poland (Museum of History of Polish Jews) as well as in the U.S. (Polish Studies Chair at Columbia University). In 2012, Mr. Rojek was decorated by the President of the Republic of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski, with a Knight’s Cross of the Order for Merit of the Republic of Poland for his work with the Jan Karski U.S. Centennial Campaign.

Sigmund Rolat was born in 1930 in Częstochowa, Poland. He spent the war in the Częstochowa Ghetto where he lost his only brother and parents. His brother was the youngest of six Jewish partisans executed by a German firing squad, his father fought and died during an uprising in the Treblinka death camp, his mother died in a death camp. Rolat was deported to the HASAG Pelcery labor camp in Częstochowa. Immediately after the War, he emigrated to the U.S., and obtained a university degree in international relations. He developed a financial firm specializing in imports. He has been visiting Poland since the 1960s, and has been actively engaged in restoring the memory of Częstochowa’s Jews. He is the chairman of the North American Council of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and one of the Museum’s major benefactors. He actively supports cultural institutions and events, including Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, The Częstochowa Philharmonic and the Cracow Jewish Culture Festival. He is also involved in philanthropic activities in the U.S., where he is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Kosciuszko Foundation – the U.S.’s most significant Polish-American cultural and educational institution. Rolat is an Honorary Citizen of the City of Częstochowa.

Roma Sendyka is the Director of the Research Center for Memory Cultures, teaches at the Center for Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Polish Studies Department, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. She specializes in criticism and theory, visual culture studies, and memory studies. She was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Kościuszko Foundation Research Fellow, and was awarded in the Patterns Program for the project “(In)visible Loss. The Holocaust and the Everyday Visual Experience in Contemporary Poland and Central Europe”; European Holocaust Research Infrastructure fellow in NIOD – Instituut voor Oorlogs–, Holocaust– en Genocidestudies, Amsterdam (2013). She published Nowoczesny esej [The Modern Essay, 2006], Od kultury ja do kultury siebie [From I to Self. A Cultural Turn – forthcoming, 2015]. Her theoretical approach to the issue of contested sites was presented in a recent publication: Prism – Understanding Non-Sites of Memory (Cahiers Parisiens, Univ. of Chicago Press, Paris 2014), a further development of which (Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-Sites of Memory) won the Michel Henry Heim Translation Prize 2014 and will be published in East European Politics and Societies.

Nancy Sinkoff is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, and Director of the Center for European Studies, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.Her fields of interest include early modern and modern Jewish history, East European Jewish intellectual history, the Enlightenment, politics, and gender. Her most recent publications include Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderland (2004), “Yidishkayt and the Making of Lucy S. Dawidowicz,” the introduction to Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 1938-1947: A Memoir (2008); Her book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, is in progress. Professor Sinkoff is a recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the IIE Fulbright Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University’s Beinecke Library, the Frankel Center at the University of Michigan, the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. She was selected for the inaugural cohort (2015-2017) of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America’s Fellows program.

Bożena Shallcross’ research interests have evolved from the focus on the verbal-visual interrelationship (Shadow and Form: On the Visual Imagination of Leopold Staff; Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky) through interrogating national and ethnic identities, in particular, those manifested in diverse modes of habitation (Framing the Polish Home: The Postwar Literary and Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self) to a discourse on objects and material culture as exemplified in her monograph The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture. Currently, she is working on several projects of which An Enigma of Survival will be completed and presented at the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies in the fall 2016.

Keely Stauter-Halsted is a specialist in the history of modern Eastern Europe, Poland, Jewish history, gender history, and the Holocaust. Much of her publications examine non-elite social classes and excluded population groups in Polish society. Her work has also explored Polish-Jewish relations and the history and culture of Jewish communities in Poland. Among her publications is The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Rural National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1900 (Cornell University Press, 2001), which won the Polish Studies Association’s Orbis Prize for outstanding book on Polish affairs in 2002.She has also been active in East European Studies programs, study abroad in Poland, and several organizations associated with the American Association of Slavic Studies, including as a board member with the Polish Studies Association. She is a frequent speaker at conferences featuring scholars from Central and Eastern Europe and North America. Stauter-Halsted earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Whitman College. She received a master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies and a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan.

Michael Steinlauf is professor of history and director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at Gratz College in Philadelphia. He is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust as well as numerous studies of prewar Jewish culture in Poland, and contributing editor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. His writings have been translated into Hebrew, Polish, German and Italian. Professor Steinlauf has also been active in various kinds of Jewish memory work in Poland including serving as chief historical advisor and curator of modern Jewish culture for the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews which recently opened in Warsaw. He is currently at work on a study of the Yiddish writer and activist Y. L. Peretz.

Karolina Szymaniak is Assistant Professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Poland, where she heads the Yiddish Culture Unit and at the Wrocław University (Jewish Studies Department). She is a researcher, editor, translator from Yiddish, English, and language instructor with a PhD in literary and cultural studies. Her research interests range across modern Jewish literatures and cultures, Polish-Jewish literary and cultural relations, the politics of memory, theories of modernism and of the avant-garde, women’s literature, and translation studies. She was the editor-in-chief of “Cwiszn” (Tsivshn), a Polish-language literary and arts quarterly devoted to Yiddish culture. She serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Polish Association for Yiddish Studies and the Program Committee of the Michal Friedman Foundation for Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures. In 2010-2012 she was director of the Center for Yiddish Culture where she now serves as an academic advisor, and the director of the International Summer Seminar in Yiddish Language and Culture in Warsaw. Her book on the Polish-Yiddish modernist writer, Debora Vogel, “Być agentem wiecznej idei. Przemiany poglądów estetycznych Debory Vogel” (Agent of the Eternal Idea: The Changing Aesthetics of Debora Vogel) was published in 2006 in Poland, and she is editor and translator of “Warszawska awangrarda jidysz” (The Warsaw Yiddish Avant-Garde), a bilingual anthology of avant-garde Yiddish literature and “Dialog poetów” (Dialogue of Poets), a trilingual volume on Czesław Miłosz’s contacts with Avrom Sutzkever and other Jewish writers. She is the editor of Rachel Auerbach’s ghetto writings, a first full and annotated edition of Auerbach’s most important text from 1941-1942. Currently, her anthology of Yiddish poetry by women, prepared in collaboration with Joanna Lisek and Bella Szwarcman-Czarnota, is awaiting publication.

Karen Underhill is Assistant Professor of Polish Literature and Polish-Jewish Studies in the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on Jewish and Polish modernisms, multilingual Polish culture, and the work of Bruno Schulz, about whom she is currently completing a book entitled “Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity”.

Yechiel Weizman is a PhD candidate in the department of Jewish history at the university of Haifa. He holds degrees in culture studies and philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting scholar at the University of Warsaw. For several years he has worked in the international school for Holocaust studies at Yad-Vashem as an educator and programs developer. His PhD project focuses on the social function and symbolic status of Jewish sites in Poland after the Holocaust. Combining anthropological and historical methods, his research seeks to explores the ways in which the material Jewish traces in communist and post-communist Poland were and are perceived, experienced and remembered by the Polish society.

Marcin Wodziński is professor of Jewish history and literature at the University of Wrocław, Poland. His special fields of interest are Jewish material culture and the social history of Jews in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, especially history of Hasidism and Haskalah.

Geneviève Zubrzycki is Associate Professor of Sociology, Director of the Copernicus Program in Polish Studies, and Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan. She is currently Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Culture Section. Professor Zubrzycki studies national identity and religion; collective memory and mythology; and the debated place of religious symbols in the public sphere. Her award-winning book, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006), was translated into Polish in 2014 (Nomos) and she has recently completed a historical ethnography of national identity in Quebec (Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec, University of Chicago Press). This academic year she’s a fellow Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at Michigan, where she is at work on a book manuscript on the “Jewish turn” in Poland, tentatively entitled : Resurrecting the Jew: National Identity, Philosemitism, and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Poland. She has published several articles on the topic, most recently in Comparative Studies in Society and History (2016)