CCPS hosts the Dianne Widzinski Visiting Fellowship, which is intended to extend knowledge of contemporary Polish society and politics and provide Polish scholars with opportunities to conduct and share their research at the University of Michigan. The first group of fellows arrived in Winter 2024. Visit the fellowship page for more information and to apply.
Winter 2025
Paweł Bagiński
Widzinski Research Fellow, Winter 2025
Paweł Bagiński is a PhD Candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw and a junior researcher in the project “National Habitus Formation and the Process of Civilization in Poland After 1989: A Figurational Approach” led by Prof. Marta Bucholc and funded by the Polish National Science Centre. His dissertation is on Polish media discourse from the 1990s and 2000s about sexual harassment in the workplace. He is interested in gender, violence, labor, and postsocialism/neoliberalism in Poland. Bagiński was a visiting researcher at the Gender Studies Department, Central European University in Vienna. He received his BA in sociology and MA in cultural studies from the College of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences.
Agnieszka Mrozik
Widzinski Senior Fellow, Winter 2025
Agnieszka Mrozik is an associate professor of literary studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is affiliated with two research units—the Center for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism and the Women’s Archive. She was a fellow of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena (2017), the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU (2018/19), and the DAAD program at the University of Hamburg (2019). She was recently a guest professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) (2023/24). Mrozik is the author of Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce [Female Architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist Women, Literature, and Women’s Emancipation in Postwar Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2022) and Akuszerki transformacji: Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of the Transformation: Women, Literature, and Power in Post-1989 Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012). She has co-authored and co-edited several collective volumes, including Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989 (CEU Press, 2021).
Emilia Sieczka
Widzinski Research Fellow, Winter 2025
Emilia Sieczka is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Graduate School for Social Research (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology) at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is a junior researcher in the project “National Habitus Formation and the Process of Civilization in Poland After 1989: A Figurational Approach” coordinated by Prof. Marta Bucholc at the University of Warsaw and in the project “Biography & Academic Imaginary. Polish Intellectual Diaspora in the Autobiographies of Migrant Scholars” coordinated by Dr. Kamil Łuczaj at the University of Łodź, both funded by the National Science Centre (NCN). Her dissertation applies a figurational approach to the study of nationalism in post-transformational Poland based on her investigation of school communities. Sieczka is a graduate of the University of the Arts London, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and the College of Europe. She is a research fellow at the Centre de civilisation française, Centre for Figurational Research, and the Department of History of Social Thought at the University of Warsaw.
Fall 2025
Elżbieta Durys
Widzinski Senior Fellow, Fall 2025
Elżbieta Durys is an associate professor of education (Cultural Studies Center) at the University of Warsaw. Her recent research focuses on film and history, remediation of memory in film, contemporary Polish historical cinema, as well as film education. In her work, she stresses gender perspective and critical theories. Durys has written numerous articles on film, co-edited two volumes on American cinema (2006, 2007) and two volumes on gender in culture (2005, 2014), and published three books in Polish—the analysis of John Cassavetes oeuvre (2009), the monograph of American police movies (2013), and Film as a Source of Historical Knowledge (2019). She is a member of the editorial boards of Literatura i Kultura Popularna (since 2018) and Education Research Quarterly (since 2021).
Magdalena Zdrodowska
Widzinski Senior Fellow, Fall 2025
Magdalena Zdrodowska is an associate professor of media studies and cultural studies at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She works at the intersection of disability studies, deaf studies, history of technology, and film studies. She currently focuses on the relationship between cinema and deafness and approaches deaf-related technologies, deaf spectatorship, and deaf filmmaking as lenses through which to view the history of cinema as both art and technology. She serves as a chair of the Disability Studies in East Europe research platform and as a member of the executive committee of the Society for the History of Technology SHOT. Zdrodowska has translated L. Davies' Enforcing Normalcy into Polish (2022). She is currently working on her third book, Deaf Cinema. Her earlier monographs are Telewizja na pograniczach [Television on the Borderlands] (2013) and Telefon, kino i cyborgi [Telephone, Cinema and Cyborgs] (2021).
