Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

CV

I am a cultural historian and sociologist. My fields of interest include: contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, Jewish/non-Jewish relations, Holocaust studies, nationalism and national symbols, Jewish heritage and popular culture, music and identity, and memory studies.

I studied literature, cultural studies and sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and Högskolan Dalarna in Sweden. I obtained my PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (Department of History and Civilization) in 2009. I was a Humboldt Fellow at the Free University in Berlin (2011-2013) and assistant professor of Eastern European History and Culture at the University of Bremen (2013-2020). In 2021 I obtained my Habilitation in Modern History at the University of Hamburg. I have published extensively on Jewish culture, Jewish-non-Jewish relations and nationalism. My first book, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany, appeared with Oxford University Press in 2013. My second book is a cultural history of the symbol of the cross in the Polish political imagination: Cross Purposes: Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2023).