About PSC
Founded in 1977, the Polish Studies Center is a widely recognized academic community that explores Polish history, politics, literature, music, and art. For almost five decades, we have been providing intellectual leadership at institutional and national levels, and we have been supporting Polish-related research around the world. Our goal is to offer a platform for exchanging ideas, promoting multi-faceted aspects of Polish studies, and supporting multidisciplinary approaches to exploring what Norman Davies called the “Heart of Europe.” We carry out our mission by hosting lectures, seminars, and workshops, organizing conferences, sponsoring cultural events, and promoting all aspects of Polish studies at Indiana University and beyond.
Working in tandem with the IU departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures, International Studies, Political Science, as well as the Russian and East European Institute (REEI), and the Institute for European Studies (EURO), we offer
- Polish language training through the third-year level during the academic year and a summer intensive language program
- Courses about Poland and Europe in a variety of fields (history, literature, politics, anthropology, among others)
- Faculty and student exchange programs with University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University in Krakow
- A large collection of Polish materials to support dissertation and other advanced research
In a word, the Polish Studies Center is a creative hub for studying and immersing yourself in all things Polish-related.
About our director
Halina Goldberg is distinguished professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and director of both the Byrnes Russian and East European Institute and the Polish Studies Center at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. She is affiliate faculty of IU's Borns Jewish Studies Program, Institute for European Studies, and Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.
Goldberg’s interests focus on the interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies.
She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (Oxford University Press, 2008; Polish translation, 2016) and editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004), Chopin and His World (Princeton University Press, 2017, with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (A-R Edition, 2021, with Jonathan Bellman), Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (Rutgers University Press, 2023, with Nancy Sinkoff), and of a special issue of The Musical Quarterly, “Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives.”
Goldberg has written articles on various aspects of Chopin's music, national constructs in Glinka’s music, and the participation of nineteenth-century Jewish musicians in the articulation of Polish musical identity. She is a codesigner of “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen,” the multimedia exhibit at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź about the Jewish quarter in pre-World War II Łódź, which received a nomination in the category of Historical Exhibits for the 2012 Sybilla Award, Poland’s most prestigious museum award.
Her other honors include the 1998 Wilk Award for Research in Polish Music (Polish Music Reference Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) and a 2005-06 Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad grant in Poland (“National Identity, Assimilation, and Jewishness in Nineteenth-Century Polish Music”), and the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for the article “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” (Journal of the American Musicological Society).
Goldberg is presently working on several publications related to Chopin, music in nineteenth-century albums, women in music, and Jews and Jewishness in nineteenth-century Poland. She also serves as the project director for the Digital Scholarly Commons dedicated to the study of Jewish Life in Pre-World War II Łódź.
