Joanna Niżyńska, Director

Joanna Ni żyńska has been Director of Polish Studies Center since January 2015. 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 crossing disciplinary and national borders. Her longstanding interests in intersections between trauma, memory and the everyday are reflected in her monograph 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, 2015). In her current project she explores how globalization affects collective memory in post-1989 Poland.

Michael Young, Assistant to the Director

Michael Young is a PhD Candidate in the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology who studies national identity, music, and dance in Central and Eastern Europe. He recently returned from a year of fieldwork research in Poland for his dissertation project, On the City Life of Polish Village Culture, which explores the contested visions and performances of Polish folk culture and identity as represented by various urban music and dance collectives.