Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism
Room 138
Office hours: Wednesdays 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.; Room 131.
Members of the Center:
Chair: Dr. Grzegorz Wołowiec
Dr. Katarzyna Chmielewska
Associate Professor Krzysztof Gajewski
Professor Emeritus Michał Głowiński
Dr. Kajetan Mojsak
Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik
Mr. Paweł Rams, M.A., a doctoral student at the Institute
Dr. Anna Sobieska
Mr. Bartłomiej Starnawski, M.A.
Dr. Tomasz Żukowski, M.A.
Members of the Center from Outside of the Institute:
Dr. Anna Artwińska, the University of Hamburg
Dr. Aranzazu Calderón Puerta, the University of Warsaw
Dr. Aleksandra Sekuła
Dr. Anna Zawadzka, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences
The Center for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism was founded on April 30, 2011. The scholars who form the team use various methodological tools and sources of inspiration: discourse analysis, narratology, Hyden White’s idea of historical emplotment, Renhard Kosselleck’s historical semantics, the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. But all their works merge into one whole. They focus on the analysis of the notion and the phenomenon denoted by communism and its changing fate from the 1940s to the present day. Therefore, the team’s interests lie in images of communism and broadly understood pragmatism, as well as the complicated semantics of this term in literary works, films, journalistic texts, essays, biographies, scholarly works, and artifacts. Communism and its old and contemporary textualizations are treated as cultural practice whose discursive dimension seems to be inextricably linked with the social aspect.