In-person talk and book launch by Karen Underhill, University of Illinois Chicago, in conversation with Irena Grudzińska-Gross, scholar and writer
In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like a number of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.
Presented by Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), The Polish Cultural Institute New York and The Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA).
Karen Underhill is Associate Professor of Polish and Jewish Studies in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research at the intersection of Polish and Jewish cultures and literatures focuses on Polish and Yiddish modernisms; Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish culture in the interwar period; and changing narratives of Poland as a multilingual and pluralist space of encounter. An alum of the TCDS's Democracy & Diversity Summer Institute, she received her PhD in Polish and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, was Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and is co-founder of Massolit Books & Cafe in Krakow. Her articles have appeared in POLIN, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic & East European Journal, Ruch Literacki, Teksty Drugie, and Czas Kultury. She is currently working on a book manuscript on feminist translation as activism in multilingual interwar Poland.
Irena Grudzinska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She studied in Poland, Italy and in the United States; she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities. She was also a professor in the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Science and in 2018, a Guggenheim Fellow. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation. Her books include “Golden Harvest” with Jan T. Gross, Oxford University Press, 2012, “Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets,” Yale University Press, 2009, and “The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination,” University of California Press, 1995.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies: TCDS’s transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
Polish Cultural Institute New York, established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission to the United States serving under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. The mission of the Polish Cultural Institute New York is to share Polish heritage, history and art with American audiences, and to promote Poland’s contributions to the success of world culture. The Institute does so through initiating, supporting and promoting collaboration between Poland and the United States in the areas of visual art, design, film, theater, dance, literature, music, and in many other aspects of intellectual and social life. The Institute’s main task to ensure Polish participation in the programming of America’s most important cultural institutions as well as in large international initiatives.
The Institute works with renowned cultural and academic centers and opinion leaders operating on the American market. Its main partners include such prestigious organizations as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Museum of Modern Art, PEN American Center, the Poetry Society of America, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Harvard Film Archive, the CUNY Graduate Center, the Julliard School of Music, the New Museum, the Jewish Museum, La MaMa E.T.C. and many others. For more than fifteen years, it has presented Americans the achievements of outstanding Polish artists, including the filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Skolimowski; the writers Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Szymborska; the composers Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski and Mikolaj Gorecki; theater artists Krystian Lupa, Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor; the visual artists Krzysztof Wodiczko, Katarzyna Kozyra, Alina Szapocznikow and many other important figures in the arts. The Institute initiates and actively participates in debates around the humanities in the broad sense, including those concerning history and the today’s most important social and political occurrences.
The Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA) is a non-profit, 501 © tax exempt, academic, cultural organization founded in 1942 in New York City is dedicated to the maintenance of a center of learning and culture. Their mission is to advance knowledge about Poland and Polish Americans and serve as a liaison between American and Polish academic communities.
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