Polish Studies scholar, Ewa Stańczyk, will give a talk Archival Photographs and the Commemoration of Jewish Children in Poland at the conference ‘Memories and Identities in Central and Eastern Europe’ at Trinity College Dublin (9 May 2015).
About the Talk
This talk explores the representations of Holocaust in Poland by discussing the ways in which photographs of Jewish children are used in public commemoration. In particular, Ewa will examine projects that came to the fore in the last few years and focus on two Polish cities that had significant Jewish communities prior to the war, namely Łódź and Lublin. In her analysis, Ewa will argue that a “postmemorial reading” of archival photographs by predominantly gentile artists and social actors might be viewed as an attempt to rhetorically fill the void left after the extermination of Poland’s Jewish community and to project an image of a tolerant civic society. While looking at the ways in which these images feature in commemoration, she will also reflect on the interaction between the visual representations of Jewish children, the memory of the Shoah in Poland and the fashioning of Polish national and regional identities in the wake of the accession to European Union.
About Ewa Stańczyk
Ewa Stańczyk is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on the remembrance of war and genocide, cultural geography and nation building. Currently, she is the EURIAS Junior Fellow at NIAS working on a project devoted to the commemoration of World War II children in contemporary Poland.