Historian, Vienna

Visiting Fellow
(July – December 2012; April – July 2013)

Project:

The Nation Writes. Polish ‘Social Memoir’ and the Project of Everyman Autobiography from the Great Depression to the Holocaust

My research explores the extraordinary impact of memoirs by ‘ordinary’ people (workers, peasants, the unemployed) in interwar Poland. Submitted as entries to memoir-writing contests, hundreds of ‘everyman autobiographies’ were gathered, published, and avidly discussed by sociologists and the public. Through an examination of these texts and the conversation they provoked, I hope to explore the deployment of life-writing in a variety of late-modern political, academic, and legal discourses.

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