Natalie Misteravich-Carroll, Interim Director

Natalie Misteravich-Carroll received her PhD in Polish Literature and Culture from the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University in 2016. Natalie’s current book project, Forging an Identity for Poland’s First Socialist City: Representations of Nowa Huta from 1949 to 2016, is an interdisciplinary study that treats the literary and cultural texts of Nowa Huta as the main discursive weapons used on the battlefield where the power to control identities, narratives, and agency was originally waged in the 1950s and where it continues to be fought today. Her primary research interests revolve around investigating the interactive relationship between texts and society, intertextuality as a form of identity negotiation, and the cultural hegemony of the communist period and its lingering influence on post-1989 cultural and social formations. This past year, Natalie developed and filmed a series of online Polish culture lectures for Indiana University’s Center for International Business Education and Research (IU CIBER) which is available as an open access video-learning series for the global community.

Joanna Niżyńska, Director on Leave

Joanna Niżyńska has been Director of the Polish Studies Center since January 2015. As Associate Professor of Polish in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, she approaches her field from a comparative perspective and pursues research that crosses disciplinary and national borders. Her longstanding interests in intersections between trauma, memory and the everyday are reflected in her monographs The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Bialoszewski and the Quotidian, the Traumatic, and the Queer (Northwestern UP, 2013) and German-Polish Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Livable Past (co-edited with Kristin Kopp, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently completing the manuscript of A History of Polish Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, a volume co-authored by a team of international scholars  (forthcoming with the U of Toronto Press, 2016).

Austin Wilson, Graduate Assistant for the Polish Studies Center