Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna and the Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe" invite to the first Transformative Salon of the Summer Semester 2023.
With Prof. Dariusz Stola (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Dr. Jelena Đureinović (Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe"), moderated by Dr. Magdalena Baran-Szołtys (RECET).
New Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Wien
Policies on the past have been a key component of the program and practice of the populist party ruling Poland since 2015. It has for decades invested substantial resources in efforts to set the agenda of public debates on the past, influence collective memories, and exploit related emotions of pride, suspicion, and resentment. Polish "memory wars" proved effective in mobilizing supporters, delegitimizing opponents, and justifying policies. The (ab)uses of the past are thus unlikely to disappear.
Dariusz Stola is a historian, professor at the Institute for Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. He has researched Poland's political and social history in the twentieth century, particularly Polish-Jewish relations, international migrations and the communist regime, as well as the memory of these pasts. He has authored numerous articles and six books, including: Kraj bez wyjścia? Migracje z Polski, 1949-1989 [Migrations from Poland 1949-1989]; Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968, [The anti-Zionist campaign in Poland 1967-1968]; and Nadzieja i zagłada [Hope and the Holocaust]. In 2014-2019 he was the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Jelena Đureinović is a historian interested in memory politics and memory cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is the scientific coordinator of the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Her main research interests include memory studies, the history of Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav space. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution was published with Routledge in 2020. Her current project investigates Yugoslav socialist internationalism and the global history of the Yugoslav culture of remembrance, focusing on the role of memory in the relations between the Yugoslav Partisan veterans and anti-colonial liberation movements from Africa. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association.
Magdalena Baran-Szołtys is a scholar of literature and culture with a background in German and Slavic Studies working as a postdoctoral researcher (Hertha-Firnberg-fellow, FWF) within the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) and at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, taught German and literature at the University of Sydney and worked at the Institute of 20th and 21st Century Literature at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests include German, Polish, and Ukrainian literature; narratives of inequality and transformation; travels; memory cultures; postsocialism; Austrian Galicia; and the social and cultural history of East Central Europe. In 2021 her first monograph “Galizien als Archiv. Reisen im postgalizischen Raum in der Gegenwartsliteratur” (Vienna University Press) was published.
FREE ENTRY. No registration is needed to participate live. Event language will be English.
The event will be broadcast live via Zoom, registration is requested only from those guests who would like to be connected via Zoom.
