Research Area(s):

• literary and cultural studies approaches to intersections of social space and transatlantic discourses on race, nationality, (queer) sexuality, and gender
• African-American literature (esp. James Baldwin)
• feminist, and critical race theory; visual culture
• post-totalitarian East-Central Europe    
• 20th-century immigrant literatures
• East European immigrant women writers
• Polish-Jewish studies

Books

Memory Wars: Museums, Race, and the New Borderlands of Culture. In early stages of research and drafting.

James Baldwin: The Life Album. Black Lives biography series (edited by David Blight, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Jacqueline Goldsby), Yale UP, 2025.

Archiving the Invisible House: James Baldwin’s Virtual Writer’s Museum. Digital Humanities and Black Digital Humanities project consisting of a digital collection and a showcase of student work.

Digital collection published in 2019. Book (e-book) in progress.

Chez Baldwin Exhibit. Collaboration with NMAAHC/Smithsonian, 2019. The project involved proposing and pitching the exhibit, writing the narrative, and providing images.

Me and My House: James Baldwin’s Last Decade in France. Duke University Press, 2018.

James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile. Duke University Press, 2009.*

*Modern Language Association William Sanders Scarborough Prize for an Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture. Honorable Mention, Errol Hill Award (for outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies) from the American Society for Theater Research.

How We Found America: Reading Gender through East-European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Edited Books

Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through the East-West Gaze, with                    Sibelan Forrester and Elena Gapova. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality and National Identity in American Literature, with Nicholas F. Radel and Tracy Fessenden. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism. Aarhus and Oxford: Aarhus University Press, Printed in the UK, 1998.

Current projects:

• Memory Wars: Museums, Race, and the New Borderlands of Culture; book in progress
• "Z takich Kielc"/Out of that Kielce: The Invisible City through Three Buildings; ; book in progress
• Archiving the Invisible House: James Baldwin’s Virtual Writer’s Museum (digital humanities book and collection in progress at the UMDL)

Public Scholarship and Collaborations:

• “Chez Baldwin” online exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture/Smithsonian, Washington D.C. (forthcoming spring 2020)
• “Borderland Foundation” (culture animation and multicultural Eastern Europe NGO) in Sejny, Poland
• The James Baldwin Project: https://www.jamesbaldwinproject.org/

Award(s)

• Professor Zaborowska is the Winner of the 2009 William Sanders Scarborough Prize Award
• 2009-2010 Hunting Family Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities
• Honorable Mention, Errol Hill Award (for outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies) from the American Society for Theater Research for James Baldwin's Turkish Decade

Affiliations:

Professor Zaborowska holds a joint appointment in the Departments of American Culture (AC) and Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS)