Probing the Limits of Collective Memory: Queer and Jewish Past and the Dominant Culture in Poland

Our lecture will present some of the activities undertaken within the framework of the Research Center for LGBT+ History and Identities, established in 2019 at the University of Warsaw: the 2020 competition for queer autobiographies (organized together with Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Warsaw), the participation in the works of scientific advisory board on the exhibition at the newly opened Queer Museum in Warsaw (run by Lambda Warsaw Association), and critical editions of pivotal socialist and anarchist texts written in Poland in the early 20th century. We will explore the emerging interconnections and methodological affinities between Jewish and Queer studies in Poland, particularly as regards the history of the 20th century. We will focus on the limits imposed on historical narrative and collective memory by the dominant culture in Poland and their impact on the groups that have important parts of their past erased. We will also reflect on possible forms of breaching these limitations.

Eine Veranstaltung des Aleksander-Brückner-Zentrums für Polenstudien und des Imre-Kertész-Kollegs Jena.

Piotr Laskowski
associate professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw. His research focuses on the history of ideas, and political philosophy of 19th and 20th centuries, specifically on the history of anarchism and Jewish participation in radical political movements in Polish lands. He has co-edited three volumes of the underground press from the Warsaw Ghetto preserved in the Ringelblum Archive. He has co-founded the Research Centre for LGBT+ History and Identities at the University of Warsaw and collaborated on the permanent exhibition in the QueerMuzeum in Warsaw.

Łukasz Mikołajewski
historian of ideas and sociologist, assistant professor at the Department of History of Ideas and Cultural Anthropology, deals with the connections between political philosophy, literature and cultural history. He defended his doctoral thesis at the European University Institute in Florence on the writers of the Parisian ‘Kultura’ and the post-war transformations of the understanding of Europe and the West in Poland.