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Introduction
Associate Professor in the Cultural History of Eastern and East-Central Europe, Institute of European Studies, University of Bremen.
Publications
Publications (14)
“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such...
This article explores the significance of orientalism as a cultural phenomenon in Polish literature and culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Intervening in a long-standing debate about whether orientalism in Poland was an original phenomenon or a ‘derivative and imitative’ discourse, the article offers close readings of two cultural...
Setting the agenda for the chapters to come, the volume editors lay out in this chapter the importance of moving beyond the nation state in memory studies, arguing that a narrower and more specific framework than the global/universal needs to be developed. This is why they propose an alternative unit of analysis on the medium scale: the memory regi...
This contribution examines the creative energy behind the ongoing protests in Belarus, with a focus on poetry and music. Belarus is traditionally a “versocentric” society, where poetry and music have historically played important roles in consolidating national culture. In the 2020 protest movement, fast and widespread distribution through social m...
The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since t...
This chapter analyses the memory (or absence thereof) of the Jagiellonian dynasty in Belarus between from the nineteenth century to the present day.
This chapter combines trauma theory and postcolonial theory in the study of memory in post-war and post-Soviet Belarus. It argues that the Soviet myth of Belarus as the “Partisan Republic” displaced trauma, attempting to delimit the contours of memory but only deferring the painful process of coming to terms with the past. In addition, it examines...
This introductory essay begins with a discussion of World War II memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, in light of the recent and ongoing war in Ukraine. It outlines the main contours of the interplay between “memory wars” and real war, and the important “post-Crimean” qualitative shift in local memory cultures in this connection. Next, the essay...
Although the subject of this chapter is contemporary Belarusian literature, the guiding motifs are borrowed from a Polish poet born in Russian-ruled Lithuania. This is not as incongruous as it may appear: most of the lands of present-day Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus were for several centuries united under one crown as the Polish-Lithuanian Common...
The two films discussed in this article, Mysterium Occupation by Andrei Kudzinenka (Belarus 2003) and Brest Fortress by Aleksandr Kott (Belarus/Russia 2010), represent two opposing genres of memory in the post-catastrophic space of Belarusian culture. Mysterium Occupation is an open
affront to official memory and as a result it was banned in the co...
Projects
Project (1)
My research project, titled "The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Polish Literature, ca. 1800-1939", retraces the genealogy of Polish cosmopolitanism, and in so doing, it seeks to provide a dual corrective: first, to the methodological nationalism that has characterized the majority of studies on this region; second, to the notable absence of Central and Eastern European perspectives in wider scholarly debates on cosmopolitanism as a simultaneously global and vernacular phenomenon. In this way, it offers an original, critical research perspective for the cultural history of East-Central Europe, and to contribute to a comparative global history of trans- and supranational national identity discourses. The main question the research seeks to answer is: in what ways have Polish-speaking writers and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries embraced supranational ideas of cultural and ethnic diversity in their articulations of community and collective identity?
