Magdalena Baran-Szołtys is a literary and cultural scholar and has been a Hertha Firnberg Fellow of the FWF since March 2021. In her postdoctoral project, Stories Of/In Transformation – Narratives of Transformation and Inequality in Post-Socialist Poland, she examines how narratives of inequality shift in transformation processes, analyzing their manifestations in literature and public debates.

Her research and teaching focus on the literatures and cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on 20th- and 21st-century West Slavic, Ukrainian, and German-language literatures, as well as the social and cultural history of this region. Her work combines literary and cultural studies with gender studies, memory studies, and critical analyses of media and popular culture.

She studied German and Slavic studies (Polish, Czech) at the University of Vienna, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and the University of Wrocław. She earned her PhD at the interdisciplinary Doctoral College Galicia at the University of Vienna (2013–2018). In addition, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (2014), a lecturer in German and literature at the University of Sydney (2010), and a researcher in the NCN-funded project (Multi)national Eastern Galicia in the Interwar Polish Discourse (and its Selected Counter-Discourses) at the Institute of 20th- and 21st-Century Polish Literature at the University of Warsaw (2019–2021). Her research has been supported by a completion grant from the University of Vienna (2018) and a research grant from Literar-Mechana (2019). In early 2021, her monograph Galicia as Archive: Journeys to (Post-)Galicia in Contemporary Literature was published.

In 2023, she was awarded the Danubius Young Scientist Award by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe.

She is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History and a member of the research platform Transformations and Eastern Europe as well as the research group Figurations of Inequality.

Beyond her academic work, she is actively engaged in social causes. She was a board member of the Frauen*Volksbegehren 2.0 (Austrian Women's Referendum) and currently serves as Chair of the Advisory Board of the Common Good Foundation COMÚN. She also regularly contributes to media and public events, offering scholarly perspectives on current developments as part of the Third Mission, thus bridging research, social responsibility, and science communication.

Key Research Topics:

• 20th and 21st Century Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and German-language literatures and cultures (and their comparative approaches)

• narratives of inequality and transformation

• relationship between literature and politics

• gender studies

• critical analysis of media discourse and popular culture

• literature written by women and feminist discourse in Central and Eastern Europe

• memory studies (archives, postmemory, nostalgia)

• literary and journalistic travels

• Austrian Galicia; Habsburg history, legacies, and cultural memories

• social and cultural history of Central Europe

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