Friday, 3 May 2019, 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Knox Shaw Room, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
Cambridge Polish Studies is proud to host a presentation of a comprehensive new book on twentieth-century Polish culture, Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture Since 1918.
The event will feature two of the book's editors, Tamara Trojanowska (University of Toronto) and Joanna Niżyńska (Indiana University), in conversation with Stanley Bill (University of Cambridge).
Please register for a free ticket here.
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland’s return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland’s cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland’s modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film.
Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Tamara Trojanowska is Associate Professor in Polish Studies and Director of the Center for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on the intersections of drama and theatre with history and religious thought, and emphasizes issues of identity, subversion, and transgression, topics that she has published on in Poland, Canada, United States, and England.
Joanna Niżyńska is Associate Professor in Polish Studies and Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University, Bloomington. 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).
