The Centre de recherche Mondes Modernes et Contemporains from the ULB is holding a conference devoted to the newest research of Katherine Lebow, History lecturer at Oxford University. Entitled “The People Write! Polish Everyman Autobiography from the Great Depression to the Holocaust”, the conference will present the forgotten memoir-writing competitions that were organized between the two World Wars in Poland for peasants, workers, migrants, the unemployed, and other marginalized groups.

Drawing on original sources, including hundreds of unpublished memoirs from the archives, Katherine Lebow will explore this vibrant but largely forgotten experiment at the intersection of research, literature and politics in the 1930s.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
>>> ULB, Campus du Solbosch (Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50), building NA, room 5.109) – see map
>>> Monday 19 March 2018 – 12h >14h
>>> Free entrance

KATHERINE LEBOW
Katherine Lebow is graduated from Yale University and holds a PhD from Columbia University. She has been teaching at the College of Charleston, the University of Virginia , and Newcastle University. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the European University Institute (Florence) and FWF/Wiesenthal Institute (Vienna). She’s is currently teaching History at the Oxford University. Her research interests are social and cultural history of 20th-century Poland in a global context; everyday life under state socialism; autobiography and testimony, especially ‘everyman autobiographies’ ca. 1930-50; history of social science. She published Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 in 2013.