William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology
About
Geneviève Zubrzycki is a comparative-historical and cultural sociologist who studies national identity and religion, collective memory and national mythology, and the contested place of religious symbols in the public sphere. She is especially interested in how these issues play out in the Polish context, and examines the role played by anti- and philosemitism in Polish nationalism.
In her award-winning The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006; Polish trans. 2014)), Zubrzycki examined memory wars between Poles and Jews and the international conflict over the presence of Christian symbols at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Zubrzycki pursues her analysis of Polish-Jewish relations In Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland's Jewish Revival (Princeton, 2022). Primarily based on participant observation and interviews, the book analyzes the current revival of Jewish communities in Poland and non-Jewish Poles’ interest in all things Jewish. It was awarded the presitgious Wayne S. Vucinich Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Book Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.
Her scholarship received other prizes from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Polish Studies Association, the International Society for the Sociology of Religion, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Canadian Sociological Association, and from the American Sociological Association’s sections on Sociology of Culture, Political Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements.
In 2021, Zubrzycki was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her "prior achievements and exceptional promise, and the Bronislaw Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America for her "widely recognized research contributions to the social sciences, particularly as thy relate to Poland and Eas-Central Europe."
Professor Zubrzycki is the director of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia and the Copernicus Center in Polish Studies. She also co-edits, with Jeff Veidlinger and Misha Krutikov, the Indiana University Press Series "Jews in Eastern Europe."
Recent Articles (Selection)
2022 "Jan Gross's Neighbors and Poland's Narrative Shock," The Jewish Quarterly Review, 112:2, 234-238.
2020 “Polish Nationalism and the Jews,” in Liah Greenfeld (ed.) Research Handbook on Nationalism. Oxford: Edward Elgar.
2020 “The Comparative Politics of Collective Memory.” Annual Review of Sociology, 46:175–94. (with Anna Woźny)
2020 “Quo Vadis, Polonia? On Religious Loyalty, Voice, and Exit.” Social Compass, 67:2.
2017 “The Politics of Jewish Absence in Contemporary Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History, 52:2, 250-277.
2017 “Traces and Steps: Expanding Polishness Through a Jewish Sensorium?” in Geneviève Zubrzycki (ed) National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 193-215.
2016 “Nationalism, ‘Philosemitism’ and Symbolic Boundary-Making in Contemporary Poland. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58:1, 66-98.
2016 “Problematizing the ‘Jewish Turn’” in Irena Grudzińska-Gross (ed) Poland and Polin. New Interpretations in Polish-Jewish Studies. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 175-179.
2015 “‘Oświęcim’/ ‘Auschwitz’: Archeology of a Mnemonic Battleground,” in Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng (eds) Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 16-45.
