Lunds universitet har anställt Joanna Michlic som gästprofessor i samtidshistoria med inriktning mot Förintelsestudier, med placering vid Historiska institutionen. Under 2023 och 2024 kommer Joanna att förstärka institutionens forskning. Joanna presenterar sig så här:
”Joanna Michlic’s research focuses on social and cultural history of East Central Europe, and the Holocaust and its memory in Europe. She is particularly interested in areas relating to childhood, gender, family, and individual and collective memories of traumatic and difficult pasts, such as the Holocaust.
Joanna has been researching and teaching on nationalism, antisemitism and the Holocaust for more than twenty years. Her first single-authored book, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (English edition 2006, Polish edition 2015) is a study of the history of anti-Jewish tropes in Poland from the rise of modern Polish ethno-nationalism in the late nineteenth century until the early 2000s. In this monograph, she researched emotional and symbolic aspects of modern Polish nationalism and their role in the formation of collective identity, as well as their role in anti-Jewish violence. She also examined attempts at the deconstruction of anti-Jewish tropes by the liberal political and cultural elites during the first decade and a half after the political transformation of 1989. The Polish translation of the book was one of the nominees to the prestigious Kazimierz Moczarski’s Award for the best history book in 2016. Because of its relevance and importance in the field of antisemitism and national mythologies, the book was published in Hebrew in 2021, with a new epilogue.
In her current research on antisemitism, Joanna is interested in how antisemitic tropes and discourses in different countries of post-communist Europe and beyond have been permeating the memorialization of the Holocaust and have produced their own prejudicial narratives against the Holocaust and its remembrance. In order to characterize these narratives, Joanna has developed the analytical concept, remembering to forget, next to two other concepts of remembering the Holocaust remembering to remember and remembering to benefit. This research is a direct continuation of a previous work with her colleague, John-Paul Himka of Alberta University, Canada, with whom she wrote, the collection of essays, Bringing the Dark to Light: The Memory of the Holocaust in Post-communist Europe, (July, NUP, 2013). The book captures the diverse and dynamic ways in which the Holocaust has been remembered and interpreted in all the post-communist countries from 1989 to 2010, and investigates how the difficult past impacts the present, and how the present shapes the representations of that past in the sphere of political discourse, historiography, education and cultural representations.
Joanna has also been researching for the last twelve years the history of Jewish childhood during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She belongs to a group of scholars who have contributed to the recognition of the individual agency of children and insisted on defining children as important historical co-creators of everyday life. Her research on Jewish child survivors demonstrates the importance of early postwar testimonies in the reconstruction of the world of being, feeling and thinking of young survivors: that the early postwar testimonies are unsurpassed in terms of specificity of raw memories of childhood under genocidal conditions. In her most recent publication in Polish, Piętno Zagłady: Wojenna i powojenna historia oraz pamięć żydowskich dzieci ocalałych w Polsce (Collection of essays on Jewish childhood during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Warsaw, Jewish Historical Institute, 2020), she examines how the children’s early postwar testimonies written “nearby and from the bottom” complicate standard histories of rescue and survival in the history of the Holocaust. She draws a comprehensive chart of rescuers of children ranging from individuals totally devoted to the young Jewish fugitives to individuals whom she defines as rescuer-abusers and rescuer-perpetrators.
In addition, Joanna maps out strategies of self-help among older Jewish children during the Holocaust and urges other scholars to conduct a deeper analysis of this neglected subject. In her forthcoming publication of essays on Jewish childhood in Poland to be published in English and German, she also examines the experiences of children who were offspring of ethnically mixed Jewish and non-Jewish Polish couples during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She further examines the post-1945 representations of child survivors in public discourse showing how the narratives of renewal and sentimentalization are persistent in the ways in which the child survivors have been portrayed.
Her research on Jewish child survivors is connected to her current research on the history and memories of rescuers of Jews in Poland, More Than The Milk of Human Kindness: Jewish Survivors and Their Polish Rescuers Recount Their Tales, 1944-1949. The main aim of this project is to chart a first map of the raw memories of rescue as articulated by Polish Jewish survivors and their (ethnic/Catholic) Polish rescuers in the early post-war period, 1944-1949. The major claim to originality of this work is the gendered and in-depth textual analysis of previously un-examined and un-published personal and official correspondence between the rescuers, Jewish survivors and their respective families. The project offers a fresh contribution to the study of different types of rescuers and ambivalence of goodness that speaks beyond the Polish society’s case in the Second World War and thus could foster further comparative research on the postwar representations of rescue of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe. It has been supported by Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Joanna’s research on children and rescuers of Jews shows the importance of the individual and day-to-day personal experience in the historical reconstruction of a social history of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and other genocides.”
Bästa hälsningar,
Johannes