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
Associate Professor, Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Joanna Wawrzyniak, sociologist, and historian, specializes in East-Central European memory processes. Her current projects include work on memories of socialism, neoliberal transformation, and deindustrialization in Poland and contributions to collaborative research on cultural heritage and memory processes in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and East and South Asia. Joanna has long-standing expertise in oral history and museum research.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Małgorzata is sociologist and social anthropologist. Her main interests are ethnic and national identity and problems of social memory and tradition. She conducted her fieldwork in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and in the Siberian part of Russia. She published several articles and books on ethnic minorities in Poland, ethnic identity and social memory in post-Soviet countries and on the memory of resettlements.
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Tomasz Rawski is a political and cultural sociologist. He deals with issues of nationalism, symbolic/memory politics and nation-/state-building in contemporary Eastern Europe, with particular emphasis on the former Yugoslavia, Poland and Russia. He published a book on Bosniak strategies of nation-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1995, as well as several articles on these topics. Tomasz participated in several research projects focused on memory studies, including Horizon2020: REPAST. He was a visiting scholar at University College London, Uppsala University and University of Sarajevo.
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 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).
Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw
Dr. Agnieszka Nowakowska is a sociologist and historian. She has conducted research in Poland and Lithuania. She is interested in the sociology of education and the contact between official narratives about the past and everyday practices of remembrance. Her doctoral thesis examined history teaching in Vilnius schools.
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.
Doctoral Students
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).
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
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
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
Brunon Roch Kuryło is a first-year doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Social Science at the University of Warsaw. He is a sociologist and historian of ideas. His main research interests include the historical development of political and social thought (especially Polish communism), post-war power structures, and Central-East Europe intellectual history. His project, tentatively titled “Marxist Confrontations and Political Practices 1945-1956: Structuration of the Social Sciences in Post-war Poland” is supervised by Prof. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw).
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).
Visiting Scholars
Visiting researcher
Connor Arneson is from Minnesota, USA. He is a recipient of a Fulbright research grant in history at the University of Warsaw for the 2023-2024 school year. During this time, he will be studying how digital media has impacted the ways that Polish history is presented and perceived in museums and online.
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.
Visiting researcher
Elitza Stanoeva holds PhD in History (TU Berlin) and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has been Visiting Fellow in Berlin, Leipzig, Konstanz, Potsdam, Vienna, Florence and Sofia as well as Research Associate in the ERC project PanEur1970s at the European University Institute in Florence. She is author of the monograph Sofia: Ideology, Urban Planning and Life under Socialism (in Bulgarian) and many articles in Bulgarian, English and German.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Associate Researchers
Assistant Professor, Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology of the University of Warsaw
Łukasz Bukowiecki holds an MA and a PhD in cultural studies. He is a postdoctoral researcher within the Horizon2020 project ECHOES – European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities, participating in the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts. His academic interests focus on social construction of heritage, cultural history of museums and urban memory in the Baltic Sea Region.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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