11.11.2024/CBH/ Klaus Zernack Colloquium/Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe

Klaus Zernack Colloquium
Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe: Key Thinkers of Polish Humanities in the Post-War Era
by Katarzyna Bojarska, Ewa Domanska, Piotr Filipkowski, Jacek Malczynski, Luiza Nader (ed.)
Monday, 11.11. | 6 pm / CBH PAN Berlin

0:00:00 Introduction Prof. Igor Kąkolewski (director of the Center for Historical Research Berlin of the Polish Academy of Sciences)

10:16 Book presentation by: Prof. Ewa Domańska, Dr. Katarzyna Bojarska, Dr. Piotr Filipkowski

44:20 Commentary: Prof. Małgorzata Mazurek

1:09:45 Discussion

The volume offers the collection of essays written by eighteen luminous minds of the 20th century humanities and social sciences in Poland: Stefan Amsterdamski, Nina Assorodobraj-Kula, Bronisław Baczko, Jan Błoński, Jolanta Brach-Czaina, Michał Głowiński, Oskar Hansen, Maria Janion, Jerzy Jedlicki, Antonii Kępiński, Anna Pawełczyńska, Krzysztof Pomian, Mieczysław Porębski, Jan Strzelecki, Władysław Strzemiński, Jerzy Szacki, Jerzy Topolski, and Andrzej Turowski. Celebrated as canonical within their respective fields, these works resonate profoundly in academic as well as social environment today.

Ewa Domańska
Professor of Human Sciences at the Faculty of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and a recurrent visiting professor at Stanford University. She is a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Her teaching and research interests include history and the theory of historiography, comparative theory of the humanities and social sciences, environmental humanities, ecocide and genocide studies. She is the author of numerous books including Nekros. Wprowadzenie do ontologii martwego ciała [Nekros: An Ontology of Human Remains, 2017], articles published in “History and Theory,” “Rethinking History,” “Storia della Storiografia,” and (with Jacek Małczyński) a guest editor of The Environmental History of the Holocaust (“Journal of Genocide Research,” 2020).
Katarzyna Bojarska
Assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Media at the SWPS University in Warsaw and president of View. Foundation for Visual Culture; she co-founded and is the editor of the academic journal View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture www.pismowidok.org. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Fulbright and Horizon2020. Her postdoctoral book, titled Wydarzenia po Wydarzeniu. Białoszewski—Richter—Spiegelman [Events after the Event. Białoszewski—Richter—Spiegelman] was published in 2013. She has also translated and published several works by Achille Mbembe, Michael Rothberg, Susan Buck—Morss, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, Lauren Berlant, and others.
Piotr Filipkowski
Assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He is engaged in various historical and sociological research projects devoted to biographical experiences and memories of the war, socialist modernisation, and capitalist transformation in Poland and Eastern Europe. The author of a monograph Oral History and the War. Concentration Camp Experience in Biographical-Narrative Perspective (Wrocław 2010, Berlin 2019), where he analyses interviews with Polish survivors of the Nazi camps. He is the co-author of the book In den Stürmen der Transformation. Zwei Werften zwischen Sozialismus und EU (Suhrkamp 2022).
Małgorzata Mazurek
Associate Professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University, New York; specializes in modern history of Poland and East Central Europe. Her interests include history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in the twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with history of social inqualities under state socialism, and articles on labor, consumption, and history of human and social sciences in twentieth-century east-central Europe. Her current book project Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918-1968 revises the history of developmental thinking by centering east-central Europe as the locality of innovations in economic thought in post-imperial Europe and the postcolonial world.