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Join Ellen Freeberg, Associate Dean at The New School for Social Research, and Elzbieta Matynia Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies and Director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, in a conversation about Frieda Wunderlich, the first female economist at The New School for Social Research and a founding member of the 1933 “university in exile.”
They will discuss gaps in the story surrounding Wunderlich’s intellectual journey, what it meant to recover a narrative about her work and career, and how she translated her scholarship as a labor policy expert from Germany into a U.S. context, mid-career. They will also consider what one story may tell us about how we remember (or often forget) female social scientists from the past.
Moderated by Malkhaz Toria, Sociology MA student and Coordinator of The New School Memory Studies Group.
This event is FREE and open to the PUBLIC. You will receive a link to the online event after you register.
Presented by The Memory Studies Group at the New School and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research.
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Faculty of dismissed or furloughed German professors at the New School for Social Research. Left to right, seated: Emil Lederer, Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research, Freida Wunderlich, and Karl Brandt. Left to right, standing: Hans Speier, Max Wertheimer, Arthur Feiler, Eduard Heimann, Gerhard Colm, and Erich von Hornbostel. (New York Times, October 4, 1933). Photo credit: Times Wide World Photo. From: New School Histories.
Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School for Social Research. Her recent publications include “Is Liberal Democracy Already History?” (East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, August 2020), and “A Halloween Uprising: Poland’s General Strike Over Abortion” (Public Seminar, November 2020)
The Memory Studies Group at the New School is based at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) under the auspices of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). It was launched more than a decade ago by a cohort of graduate students. The conferences they organized over time that brought together leading scholars in social, cultural, and public memory across the disciplines, the fellowship programs, and finally an array of outstanding dissertations, made the New School a recognized site of Memory Studies, and one that contributed to shaping and establishing it as a field of study in the United States.
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.
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Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Her research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transformations, gender and democracy, and more recently on the challenges faced by democracies emerging with a legacy of violence. Her book Grappling with Democracy: 1989-1995 (1995) documents the debates of the first Democracy Seminar project; Performative Democracy (2009, Paradigm) examines a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens, and identifies the conditions for performativity in public life; An Uncanny Era (2013, Yale University Press) is a discussion on the precariousness of democracy, and early signs of its recent retreat in Central Europe). One of her recent essays, “How to Kill Democracy?” was published in 2019 in Social Research.
Jacek Kucharczyk is President of the Institute of Public Affairs, one of Poland’s leading think tanks. He received a PhD in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He studied at the Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw, Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Kent at Canterbury (MA in philosophy) and Warsaw University (MA in English studies). In the 1980s he was active in the independent student movement and clandestine publishing. Dr Kucharczyk has been a co-founder and board member of a number of international NGOs, including Prague Center for Civil Society and the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD) in Brussels. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Scholarship Program at Open Society Foundations. In 2008-2015 he was Advisory Board member of OSF Think Tank Fund. In 2009-2015 he was a board member of the National School of Public Administration in Warsaw. Kucharczyk has authored and edited articles, reports, policy briefs and books on European integration, democratic governance, democracy assistance, migrations and populism. His recent book-length publication is Phantom Menace: The Politics and Policies of Migration in Central Europe. Dr Kucharczyk regularly comments on current domestic and European affairs and political developments for Polish and international media.
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
