Joanna Niżyńska

Phone:

(812) 855-7351

Email:

jnizynsk@iu.edu

Department:

Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Joanna Niżyńska has been the director of the Polish Studies Center since January 2015. As Associate Professor of Polish Literature and Culture in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, she approaches her field from a comparative perspective and pursues research that crosses disciplinary and national borders. Her longstanding interests in intersection between trauma, memory, and the everyday are reflected in a monograph, The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski, and the Quotidian, the Traumatic, and the Queer (Northwestern UP, 2013; Polish translation Królestwo małoznaczącości: Miron Białoszewski a trauma, codzienność i queer, Universitas 2018), and in German-Polish Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Liveable Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is a co-editor of Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (Toronto UP, 2018), an 800-page interdisciplinary volume with sixty contributions from a team of international scholars written with an English-speaking audience in mind. Her new book project investigates contemporary Poland’s cultural memory from the perspective of long lasting imprints of communist politics of memory, particularly as pertaining to Polish-Jewish past.

Publications & Projects

Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture Since 1918, eds. Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, and Przemysław Czapliński (University of Toronto Press, 2018)

Królestwo wieloznaczącości: Miron Białoszewski a trauma, codzienność i queer. Trans. Agnieszka Pokojska (Cracow: Universitas, 2018)

The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013)

Germany, Poland and Postmemorial Relations: In Search of a Livable Past, eds. Kristin Kopp and Joanna Niżyńska (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series, 2012)

Accomplishments

“2019 Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume Award” from AATSEEL for Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture Since 1918 (Toronto UP, 2018)

Nominated for the "Best 2018 Book on Gender" award by Polish Gender Society for Królestwo małoznaczącości: Miron Białoszewski a trauma, codzienność i queer (Universitas, 2018), a Polish translation of Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic (Northwestern UP, 2013). 

Finalist for the Jan Kochanowski Award from the International Association in Polish Studies for the best book on Polish culture published outside of Poland from 2012 to 2016 for The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Białoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic.