Hosted by the Copernicus Endowment for Polish Studies at the University of Michigan
Details here: www.ii.umich.edu/crees/events/polishconf
The field of Polish studies in North America has been utterly transformed over the past decade. There are now more people than ever studying Polish language, literature, culture, history, society, and politics, and the overwhelming majority of them entered the profession after the fall of communism. With this new generation of scholars have come new forms of scholarship. The broad cluster of methodological and theoretical innovations collected under the rubric of Cultural Studies has brought to light a range of previously unexplored topics and introduced to our work a heightened degree of self-reflexivity. Work on gender and sexuality, for example, has not merely introduced new analytical categories and new themes, but shifted the way we understand the broad narratives of Polish history, culture, and society. Although Polonists have a long history of working across disciplinary boundaries, the vectors of interdisciplinarity have been shifting in recent years to bring together perspectives that were not always in dialogue. The moves towards comparative work and a new focus on transnational processes have not so much eclipsed Polish studies as forced us to critically examine the concept of the “Polish Nation” and to re-conceptualize it in more productive ways.
