About Us
We are a group of interdisciplinary scholars working at the intersection of sociology, history, social anthropology, and cultural studies. We research, publish and teach on various aspects of social memory processes in East-Central Europe.
Staff
[ON SABBATICAL LEAVE AY2025/26] Associate Professor, Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Joanna Wawrzyniak is a university professor of sociology and founding director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. . Her most recent work bridges oral history and museum studies, focusing on memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation, deindustrialization, and the decolonization of heritage. She is Principal Investigator, together with Jogilė Ulinskaitė, of the project MEPOST.
Assistant Professor, Co-director of the Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Tomasz Rawski is a political and cultural sociologist working on memory politics, wars, nationalism and socialism in contemporary Eastern Europe and beyond. He published “Pathways to Agonism. Disputed Territories and Memory” (Brill 2025, with C. Horvath) and “Bosniak Nationalism. Nation-Building Strategies After 1995” (WN Scholar 2019, in Polish), as well as several articles in renowned international journals. Tomasz took part in international projects on memory politics and wars, including H2020: DisTerrMem and H2020: REPAST. He was a visiting scholar at University College London, Uppsala University, University of Sarajevo, University of Bologna and others.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (PI), Ph.D. hab. is a sociologist and social anthropologist. She is an associate professor at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Sociology.
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Dominika works at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Her research and visual practice explore the role of memory, violence, and racialisation in fostering local and transnational activism and (un)belonging among diaspora, refugee, and migrant communities.
Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Agnieszka Nowakowska, PhD, is a sociologist and historian at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw.
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Zofia Wóycicka is assistant professor at the Sociological Faculty of the University of Warsaw where she is currently leading the National Science Centre (NCN) research project Help Delivered to Jews during World War II and the Transnational Memory in the Making. She studied history and sociology at the University of Warsaw and Jena University and received her doctoral degree at the School for Social Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences and at the University of Warsaw (2008).
Doctoral Students
Krzysztof Florek holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the AGH University of Science, and an MA in sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His thesis explored class discourses within the post-socialist, neoliberal social ontology in Poland — a topic that continues to inform his research interests. In the MEPOST project, Krzysztof takes care of our metadata and the reanalysis of biographical interviews. He is working on a doctoral dissertation about the moral emotions of transformation, developed within the framework of the project and supervised by Joanna Wawrzyniak and Jogilė Ulinskaitė.
Doctoral student
Bartosz Pergół is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. His research interests include the sociology of art and visual culture, women artists and textile art in the 20th and 21st centuries in Eastern Europe and Latin America. His dissertation focuses on the transformations of the art field intertwined with political and social upheavals, and the materiality of women weavers’ lives and work in Poland and Argentina in the 1980s and 2000s. Supervisor: Prof. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw).
Doctoral student
Brunon Roch Kuryło is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences, University of Warsaw. He previously earned an M.A. in Sociology with a thesis entitled “For a Non-Dogmatic Orthodox Marxism: Nina Assorodobraj-Kula’s Polemic with Marian Serejski on the Shape of Marxist Historiography”.
Doctoral student
Paweł Downarowicz is a first-year doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Social Science at the University of Warsaw. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Trade Unions as Mnemonic Actors. Comparative Case Study of Poland, Ukraine, and East Germany” is supervised by Prof. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw).
Doctoral student
Michalina Musielak is a PhD candidate at Center for Research on Social Memory at University of Warsaw. Researcher in Zofia Wóycicka’s NCN grant Help Delivered to Jews during World War II and Transnational Memory in Making where she conducts a comparative audience study in Poland and Germany.
Doctoral student
Emina is first year doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Social Science at the University of Warsaw. She is clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with ten years of work experience at the Institute for Psychological and Social Protection, University Clinical Center Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina). Her research project focuses on the intergenerational transmission of memory within families of those who lived through the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 1992-1996. Supervisors: Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw), Chris Hewer (Kingston University).
Doctoral student, CRSM Assistant
Zofia is the first year doctoral student at the School of Social Science, University of Warsaw. Her project is tentatively titled “Socialist Realism 1951-2021: The Genealogy of Remembering and Forgetting in the Polish Field of Art”. Socialist Realism might have ended as a dominant doctrine of cultural politics in Poland in the first half of the 1950s, but it was only then that its legacy in the field of art and art history began to take shape. Dissertation supervisors: Prof. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw), Dr. Piotr Słodkowski (Academy of Fine Arts).
Visiting Scholars
Sarajevo School of Science and Technology
Azra Imamović has more than 20 years of experience in conflict resolution, gender equality, and social inclusion.
Principal Investigator
Elitza Stanoeva holds PhD in History (TU Berlin, 2013) and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Currently, she is ERA Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sociology of University of Warsaw for the duration of her project CONDEM (May 2024 – October 2026).
Visiting researcher
Dijana is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation research focuses on the nature of relationships between individuals belonging to ethnic groups that have a history of violence between them, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Israel.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Associate Researchers
Assistant Professor, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Culture and Arts, University of Warsaw
Zuzanna Bogumił is an anthropologist and sociologist specializing in memory studies, with a particular focus on the memory of Soviet repressions and the entanglements between memory and religion in Central and Eastern Europe. Bogumił previously worked at the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw (2011–2020) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2020–2024), where she led several international projects.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Warsaw
Gil Turingan is a Filipino scholar and educator who specializes in Thai history and politics. He holds a Ph.D. in Thai Studies from Chulalongkorn University, where his research focuses on democracy discourses, memory politics, and student movements in Thailand, with particular attention to monuments and protests.
Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology University of Warsaw
Margaret Comer’s research focuses on the legacy of mass repression, Soviet and post-Soviet ways of commemoration and heritage creation, Holocaust commemoration and heritage creation, mourning and memory, and disputes about the past.
Rimantė Jaugaitė is a recent PhD graduate from the Global Histories, Cultures and Politics programme at the University of Bologna. Her dissertation explored the artistic use of coffee rituals in commemorating the Srebrenica genocide. While her recent research has focused on the Balkans, she is also interested in the wider Eastern European region and holds a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Research and Studies on Eastern Europe (MIREES). She is drawn to alternative memory practices, counter-narratives and memory activism,
nationalism and its impact on memory and identity, including hybrid and fluid identities. In the MEPOST project, she will focus on researching industrial heritage sites in Lithuania and Poland.
Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology of Culture at the University of Łódź
Małgorzata Łukianow, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Łódź, specialising in memory studies, sociology of culture, and social change, with prior roles at the Polish Academy of Sciences, TU Chemnitz, and as a Widzinski Senior Fellow at the University of Michigan in 2024.
Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences and International Studies, University of Warsaw, Department of Regional and Global Studies
Nicolas Maslowski studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris (IEP), received his PhD from the University of Paris X – La Défense Nanterre in 2009. His work focuses on Central Europe, the communist and post-communist periods, international relations, historical sociology and collective memory.
Volunteer researcher
Iga Śliwska is a student at XIV Stanislaw Staszic Highschool in Warsaw and a second-year student of Business Law at the Youth Law University (Uniwersytet Młodzieży). Iga Śliwska is passionate about history, statistics and philosophy. In September 2023 she joined Zofia Wóycicka and Michalina Musielak as volunteer in the research project “Help Delivered to Jews during World War II and Transnational Memory in the Making”. Amongst others she will do press research.
Assitant Professor, Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw
Magdalena Wróblewska is art historian with special interest in museum studies, history and theory of photography, postcolonial theories. A fellow of Lieven Gevaert Centre for Photography KULeuven (2010), Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2012-2014), research fellow of Ruskin Library, Lancaster University (2014), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2015). Head of Research in Museum of Warsaw (2015-2020), co-curator of the core exhibition Things of Warsaw (Museum of Warsaw, 2017). Authored several books and articles, including Fotografie ruin. Ruiny fotografii. 1944-2014/ Photographs of ruins. Ruins of photographs. 1944–2014 (2014); Things in a museum, in: Things of Warsaw (2017); Duality od Decolonizing: Artists’ Memory Activism in Warsaw (with Łukasz Bukowiecki and Joanna Wawrzyniak, 2021).
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Laura Pozzi is an historian of modern Chinese history. She interested in the entanglements between history, memory, and politics in the People’s Republic of China. She analysis the role of visual culture and museums in the shaping of the Chinese Communist Party’s memory politics. Recently she has published “Local Museum, National History: Curating Shanghai’s History in the Context of a Changing China (1994–2018)” (The International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2020), a study of the reframing of colonial heritage in the Shanghai History Museum from historical perspective.
Assistant Professor, Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology of the University of Warsaw
Łukasz Bukowiecki, PhD, is a scholar of cultural studies, a cultural sociologist, and a museum historian. Assistant professor at the Department of Contemporary Culture at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw.
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