Meet our SPEAKERS

Adam F. Kola is a director of the Center of Excellence IMSErt: Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments (https://imsert.umk.pl/en/) and assistant professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago (2016-2019). His research has been focused on East- and Central European intellectual and literary history of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as on knowledge transfer and the influence of East Central European émigrés on the development of the humanities and science in the West. In 2018, he published the book Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation (in Polish language).

Adriana Avram is a Ph.D. researcher in the field of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Excellence in Image Study, University of Bucharest, and a curator at the ASTRA Museum in Sibiu for the extra-European collections in Franz Binder Museum of Universal Ethnography. Her major research interest covers hypostases of exoticism concerning museification of material culture, intermediality, heritage interpretation. Selected papers: Heritage re-interpretation. Shifting perspective in „Franz Binder” Museum of Universal Ethnography from Sibiu, Romania (2020), Redefining the role of community-driven museums: reflections on/of displacement in District Six Museum, Cape Town (2020); Roma engagement in project design at ASTRA Museum (2016); Rebuilding context for Sami collections in „Franz Binder” Museum of World Ethnography (2016); Museum edutainment in rebuilding the main exhibition (2015).

Aleksandra Janus is a researcher & curator of cultural programs, graduate of doctoral studies in Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University. She is co-founder of  Museum Lab training program for Polish heritage professionals, head of the Open Culture Studio and board member of Centrum Cyfrowe , co-founder of “Muzea dla klimatu” initiative (Museums for Climate) and co-curator of Exercising Modernity Academy. In her academic work she analyzes cultures of remembrance and the role of institutions in the process of institutionalizing discourse about the past.

Aleksandra Szczepan – trained in literary studies and philosophy, co-founder and member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She authored the book Realista Robbe-Grillet (2015) together with numerous articles. Her research interests include the redefinitions of realism in 20th century literature, video testimony, performative practices of memory, and oral history. Currently, she is working on space-based testimonial practices of the witnesses to the Shoah.

Alexandra Oancă, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Alexandra is specialized in the anthropology of policy, critical urban studies, and European studies, with a focus on the interplay between governance, policies, and cities. She is interested in understanding how policies are made, remade, and contested, and how policies travel. More particularly, her research analyzes the articulation of expert-knowledge systems and knowledge production in bureaucracies and policy networks.

Technical Officer in Cultural and Historical Matters, National Historical Museum, Rio de
Janeiro, IBRAM, Brazil.

Coordinator of Inventory and Collection Management. National Ethnological Museum/DGPC, Lisbon.

Anna Szöke is currently research manager at the Centre for AnthropologicalResearch on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She studied Art History at the University of Vienna, has worked as a curator in Vienne’s museums and as a researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on collections of human skeletal remains, primarily on the Viennese Natural History Museum’ collection and similar ones in Europe. She explores the role of these collections in the development of scientific racism and practices of collecting from the 19t century until today.

Curator of the South Asian collection at The Asia and Pacific Museum, where she curated the exhibitions STIRRING, THIS IS POLAND, Nodir kule kule (contemporary Bangladeshi art). Researcher at the University of Warsaw, Chair of South Asian Studies, where she obtained her PhD in Sanskrit literature and aesthetics. Currently working on a book on Maithili painting within a grant funded by National Centre for Science Poland.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emirita at New York University. Her books include “Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage”; “Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland”, “1864–1939” (with Lucjan Dobroszycki), and “They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust” (with Mayer Kirshenblatt). She has received honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Republic of Poland. She is the recipient of the 2020 Dan David Prize. She serves on Advisory Boards for the Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, and the United States.

Bartłomiej Krzysztan - Assistant Professor at Institute of Political Studies of Polish Academy of Sciences. Graduate of Political Science at Université Libre de Bruxelles and Cultural Studies at University of Wrocław. Research interests include social and cultural memory, postcolonialism, ethnic and national identities, political anthropology of the Caucasus region within broader context of Central and Eastern Europe.

Carine Ayélé Durand is a social anthropologist and completed her doctorate at the
University of Cambridge (2010) after completing an MPhil in Ethnology at the
University of Aix-en-Provence (France, 1999) and a MA in International Negotiation
at Aix-en-Provence (France, 2000).

She has worked for nearly twenty years in various curatorial and research capacities
at the Musée des Confluences (Lyon, France, 2000-2004), the University of
Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (UK, 2004-2006), and the
Nordiska Museet (Stockholm, Sweden, 2007). She has curated several public
exhibitions about contemporary indigenous art and political movement for the Musée
des Confluences (Inuit 2002-2003), the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology (Northern Skies, Southern Stars 2006, Sápmi 2010) and the Nordiska
Museet (Sápmi 2007), and conducted a research project into collaborative exhibitions
between Indigenous Peoples and European museums (Durand, 2010). A Cultural
Heritage consultant in Barcelona, Spain between February 2011 and August 2015,
she is currently Head Curator at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva (MEG).

Since 1998, she has conducted long-term anthropological field research crossing the
boundaries of disciplines between social anthropology, education, performance
studies, and art. Her research method is based on a transnational approach which
has led her to conduct research in a wide variety of settings including anthropological
museums in Italy, France, the UK, Norway and Sweden, theatres in Brazil, and the
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

Christopher Donohue Ph.D. is Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He is the editor of various volumes in the history of biology and genetics as well as eugenics in its social and scientific contexts, especially in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He is deputy editor-in-chief of the Ideology and Politics  Journal, an academic review which focuses on post-Soviet and post-socialist legacies.  His book in the history of contemporary genetics and biology and its social and philosophical implications: HapMap, Human Variation and Our Changing Understanding of Human Heredity is now under contract with Springer Nature.

Csilla Ariese completed her Ph.D. in 2018 as part of the ERC-Synergy project NEXUS1492 at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University. Her dissertation The Social Museum in the Caribbean explored 195 Caribbean museums and the practices and processes through which they engage with a diversity of communities. She continued working within the same project as a postdoctoral researcher, developing a catalog publication of Caribbean archaeological collections held in European museums. Besides her Ph.D., she holds an MSc in International Museum Studies from Gothenburg University (2012) and at the same university completed a BA in archaeology with a specialization in maritime archaeology (2010). She has been the secretary of the Museums Association of the Caribbean since 2015. She curated exhibitions in Amsterdam and Gothenburg. In the ECHOES project, she participates in the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.

Cynthia Schimming is an internationally renowned fashion designer and clothing technologist from Namibia. In 1998 she was awarded a Laureate by UNECSO for the exceptional quality of design on the theme 'A United World for Future Generations: Beyond time, beyond Oceans’.  In 2019, she was awarded the lifetime achievement award at the Katutura Fashion Week. The same year, she was a guest researcher at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin studying the histories, materials and techniques of the Namibian collection. In this process, she created an artwork for the Humboldt Forum which not only tackles colonial violence and genocide but also understands the collection as archive of Namibian arts and crafts, interweaving historical experiences with a self-confident repositioning in the postcolonial present. After her research and work at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin she went home for a while and then she went back to Hamburg, where she was the costume designer for  “Hereroland”  a play Directed by David Ndjavera and Gernot Grünewald, based on the Herero genocide and the German Herero History, at the Thalia Theatre Hamburg.

Julia Binter, Cynthia Schimming, Nehoa Kautondokwa and Jonathan
Fine with Uaṱunua in the depot of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin in 2019. Film
still from Tracing Namibian-German Collaborations, a film by Moritz Fehr (c)
Staatliche Museum zu Berlin.

Dariusz Skonieczko (1973) – art historian, specialization art and culture of Africa, curator of African sources at The State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, wrote a dissertation on the use of interactive 3D holograms in museum at the University of Lodz Doctoral School of Humanities. He is the author of a book Zapomniany odkrywca – Stefan Szolc Rogoziński, also he took part in scientific expedition to Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Liberia, Zimbabwe).

Emily-Rose Baker is a final-year Ph.D. student based in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis is titled ‘Post-Communist Constellations: Cultures of Holocaust Memory in central-Eastern Europe’, and is funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). She is currently working on a chapter examining the ways in which the Holocaust and Bosnian genocide screen and illuminate one another in post-Yugoslav memory cultures and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue on ‘Decolonising western perceptions of Central-Eastern European Holocaust memory post-1989-91’ with Issy Sawkins.

Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is a Professor in the departments of History and Sociology-Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, where she also is Founding Director of the Curating and Public Scholarship Lab (CaPSL) http://capsl.cerev.ca/ She is the author of Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (2013); and co-editor of Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (2016); Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland (2015); and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011), as well as publishing numerous articles. In 2013 she curated the exhibit Souvenir, Talisman, Toy at the Kraków Ethnographic Museum (MEK) in Poland, and in 2014 published the accompanying book Lucky Jews and the online exhibit www.luckyjews.com. She is currently at work on a collaborative project Awkward Objects of Genocide, which resulted in the exhibition  Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust at MEK in 2018-19.

Eszter is a curator and researcher, a PhD candidate on experimental art institutions in Hungary in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation at ASCA at the University of Amsterdam. She has worked as a curator at tranzit.hu, Budapest and was a research group member in ...OPEN MUSEUM... by the Museum of Ethnography, Budapest. She is a curatorial team member of the civil initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest and is co-editor with Naeem Mohaiemen of the forthcoming anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended. Her practice revolves around methods of cultural resistance, relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South, and the exhibitionary form of research.

Museum Educator at the National Historic Museum, Rio de Janeiro, IBRAM, Brazil.

Isabel is a third-year PhD student at the University of Exeter (UK). Her project investigates contemporary Holocaust memory in the Russian Federation. It is funded by the SWWDTP (part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council). She has already presented her findings at national and international conferences, including the British Association of Holocaust Studies 2019 conference, and held a placement at the Summer Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. She will also present her work at the upcoming ASEEES and ICCEES Conferences in North America. Issy was postgraduate representative for the British Association of Holocaust Studies for 2019/2020.

James Mark is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter (UK). He is the author of the Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Eastern Europe and co-author of 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe. He recently co-edited a collection of populist and decolonial approaches to historical memory:  https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.342/

Dr. Joanna Paprocka-Gajek – head of the Art Department at the Museum of King Jan III's Palace at Wilanow.

Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska, PhD in anthropology. Currently she works in the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology University of Warsaw and she cooperates with Intercultural Studies Institute of Jagiellonian University and Museum Auschwitz- Birkenau. Fellow of Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Program at the Columbia University (2018), Leadership Academy for Poland (2016). Grantee of the Fulbright scholarship (2015-2016), grantee of the European Commission’s program - Marie Curie Conferences and Training Courses - Multi-Disciplinary and Cross-National Approaches to Romany Studies - a Model for Europe (Central European University, 2009) and of the U.S. State Department Program - International Visitor Leadership Program. Grantee of the Gypsy Lore Society. Members of European Academic Network on Romani Studies. Author and editor of the books and articles connected with Roma communities, minorities, human rights.

Joanna Warsza (born in Warsaw, based in Berlin) is an independent curator and the Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University. Among many other projects she has curated and published (together with Jan Sowa) Everything is Getting Better. Unknown Knows of Polish (Post)Colonialism (SAVVY, 2017). Recent curatorial projects also include Public Art Munich 2018; die Balkone. Art, Life, Pandemic and Proximity, co-curated with Ovul O. Durmusoglu with whom she also co-curates the upcoming Autostrada Biennale 2021 in Kosovo.

Dr. Joanna Wasilewska is art historian, working at the Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw since 1992; since 2013, as its director. As the curator, she focused on East and South-East Asia’s cultures’ heritage. Intercultural relations are also her field of interest, including her PhD thesis Image of peoples of Asia in the art of Jesuit order in Poland, 17th-18th c. (2005, published in 2006). As the Museum’s representative, she has been participating in the activities of several international organizations, such as ASEMUS and ICOM Poland. She was one of the founding members and vice-president of the Polish Institute of World Art Studies. She has been lecturing at the Asian Studies faculty of SWPS University of Social Studies and Humanities in Warsaw and of the Institute of Middle and Far East of Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Joanna Wawrzyniak leads the Center for Research on Social Memory at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. Historian and sociologist by training, she works on various aspects of collective memory in Poland from a comparative perspective. She is the author of Veterans, Victims, and Memory: the Politics of the Second World War in Communist Poland (2015); co-author of Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (2018Pb) and of Cuts: Oral History of Post-socialism (2020 in Polish); as well as the co-editor of Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (2016). In the ECHOES project, she is responsible for a work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.

Jürgen Zimmerer is Professor of Global History and the head of the research center “Hamburg’s (post-)colonial legacy” at the University of Hamburg. Between 2005 and 2017 he was founding president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). Between 2005 and 2011 he also served as Editor/Senior Editor of the Journal of Genocide. His research interests include German Colonialism, Comparative Genocide, Colonialism and the Holocaust, and Environmental Violence and Genocide.

His books “German Rule, African Subjects. State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in South West Africa” and “From Windhoek to Auschwitz? On the relationship between Colonialism and the Nazism” are currently been translated and will be published in English in 2021.

Karolina Ufa is a trainer, activist of Fundacja Q where she is taking care of organizational archives and a student of Gender Studies, Intersectionality, and Change at the University of Linköping. Fundacja Q  in cooperation with Google Arts and Culture opened the first Polish virtual LGBTQ+ museum and has its structure a historical club that is solely focused on collecting, archiving, and disseminating materials about contemporary Polish queer history. It aims to preserve the history of Polish non-heteronormative people by documenting the stories of their constant existence alongside heteronormative people in society.

Dr Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius teaches art history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was Curator and Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw, as well as Guest Professor at the Humboldt University Berlin. Her publications include National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (2001), Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (2000); Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (2011), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (2015, with Piotr Piotrowski). Her recent book Imagining and Mapping Eastern Europe is under contract with Routledge.

Katarzyna Nowak has been associated with the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology since its beginning - she began work at the Manggha Center in 1995, earning further professional degrees: assistant, senior assistant, curator, head of the division, deputy director. For many years he has been building a program of mutual relations between Poland and Japan, cooperating with the Embassy of Japan in Poland, universities in Poland and Japan, smaller cultural centers. A graduate of Polish studies (master's thesis on the relations between Poland and Japan in the period) and Museum Curatorial Studies at the Jagiellonian University.

A specialist of modern Chinese history and culture, with a focus on comic strips, cinema, and museums. She spent her undergraduate years studying Chinese language and culture at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, and at the Sichuan Foreign Studies University. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2014 at the Department of History and Civilization in the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. Her dissertation analyses the production of satirical comic strips in Shanghai between the 1930s and the 1960s, and their employment in public history projects in contemporary China. In the ECHOES project, she participates in the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio is Associate Director in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. She received her BA in history from the University of Puerto Rico and PhD from the University of Michigan. Ureña Valerio is the author of “An Empire of Scientific Experts: Polish Physicians and the Medicalization of the German Borderlands, 1880-1918,” in Liberal Imperialism in Europe: An Anthology, ed. by Matthew Fitzpatrick (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019).

Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi is a Sāmoan artist, curator, researcher and writer who intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous presences, languages, and ceremonial-political practices. They explore Indigenous possibility as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that erase faʻafafine-faʻatama from kinship structures and archives. Living between Mparntwe/Alice Springs and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, they are the inaugural Horizon/Indigenous Futures postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, and a member of The Space Between Us SSHRC partnership (2020-28) led by Dr Julie Nagam at University of Winnipeg, and a board member of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones.

Lorena Sancho Querol is Researcher in the area of Social Museology at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Her most recent project “SoMus: Society in the Museum”, is concerned with the definition of new models of participatory management in local museums. She integrates since 2016 the coordination team of the P2020 project “Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas” (CREATOUR), and since 2018 the coordination team of the WP4 of the H2020 project European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities (ECHOES).

Dr. Lucjan Buchalik - Director of the Municipal Museum in Żory.

Łukasz Bukowiecki holds an MA and a PhD in cultural studies. He is a postdoctoral researcher within the Horizon2020 project ECHOES at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. His academic interests focus on social construction of heritage, cultural history of museums and urban memory in the Baltic Sea Region. In 2015 he published a book on cultural history and social function of open-air museums in Sweden and Poland Czas przeszły zatrzymany [The past arrested]. In 2019 he defended his PhD dissertation about planned but never opened museums in Warsaw in the 20th century at the Institute of Polish Culture of the University of Warsaw. In the ECHOES project, he participates in the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.

Magda Rubenfeld Koralewska is a social entrepreneur, cultural producer, and activist. Co-founder: Beit Krakow (the first post-war progressive community in Krakow), Jew Not Painted (presenting illustrated 19th-century history of Jews in Poland) or FestivALT (Jewish art & activism collective, investigating complexities of the contemporary Jewish Poland). Magda currently works as Limmud's Regional Coordinator for Central and Eastern Europe. She deals with the issues of Jewish memory, Polish-Jewish dialogue, informal Jewish education and community engagement. Co-author of participatory interventions offering a critical look at museum collections.

Dr Magdalena Buchczyk is an anthropologist and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Museum of European Cultures (MEK). Her interests revolve around questions of knowledge production through material culture, museum collections, and ethnography of learning, skill, craft, and making. Magda’s research was published in Museum Anthropology, City and Society, Oxford Review of Education, Textile: Journal of Craft and Culture, and Journal of American Folklore. She is currently working on a book monograph, Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum to be published with Bloomsbury Academic.

Magdalena Moskalewicz, PhD is an art historian, curator, and editor, currently Assistant Professor, Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she was A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, working for MoMA’a global research program, C-MAP. Her academic research mostly spans the art of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in the former Eastern Europe, while her curatorial projects engage in collaborations with living artists, examining the postcommunist condition and its parallels with postcoloniality. Moskalewicz is currently working on the history and memory of Eastern European Socialist Realism, including its museification.

Magdalena Pinker PhD – a chief-curator of the National Museum in Warsaw’s Department of Oriental Art. Curator and co-curator of the exhibitions presenting Asian art: Paderewski (2018), Life in the Midst of Beauty. The World of a Chinese Scholar. Art from the National Museum of China (2016–2017) and Splendour and Finesse. Spirit and Substance in Korean Art (2019–2020). She is an associate professor at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw. Her research interests are focused on various aspects of Islamic art and architecture and the interpretation of decorative motifs of Asian art.

Magdalena Wróblewska, Ph.D., is an art historian, a specialist of modern art and culture, with special focus on museology and photography's history and theory. Assistant professor at the Faculty of „Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, and Head of Research Department in the Museum of Warsaw. A visiting fellow of Kunsthistorisches Instiut in Florenz- Max- Planck- Institut, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Lieven Gevaert Reseach Centre for Photography at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. She is the author of Fotografie ruin. Ruiny fotografii. 1944-2014/ Photographs of ruins. Ruins of photographs. 1944- 2014 (2014); “Things in a museum”, in: Things of Warsaw (2017). Co-curator of Room of Portraits in Museum of Warsaw. In the ECHOES project, she participates in the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.

Magdalena Zych

Cultural anthropologist, graduate of the doctoral studies in Anthropology at the Jagiellonian University.

Curator and keeper at the Seweryn Udziela Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. Since 2009 she coordinates research projects and cooperates with artists, activists and academics. She is creating space for critical intervention inside institution based on collections and permanent exhibition.

She was head of the research teams and co-curated exhibitions The Art of the Allotment (2012), Wedding 21 (2016), she is co-author and co-editor of the books The Art of the Allotment (2012) and Weddings 21 (2016).

She worked in research teams of collaborative project: Awkward Objects of Genocide. Vernacular Art on the Holocaust and Ethnographic Museums, developed within the project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (Horizon2020, Reflective Society, 2016-2019), which resulted in the exhibition  Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust at The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków (2018-19). Currently she cooperates in the research project Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context (Beethoven, NCN/DFG, Humboldt Univ., with Roma Sendyka and Magdalena Waligórska, 2020-2023)

She is currently at work on reinterpretation of the museum’s Siberian collection (project Anthropological Reinterpretation of the Siberian Collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow Coming from the 19th Century Polish Researchers of Siberia (2016-2019) awarded by National Humanities Development Programme). The resoults of the research are currently presented on the exhibition Siberia. Voices from the North at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków (2020-2021) and on the museum website.

In her academic works she researches ethnographic collections in Poland in the international perspective.

Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, Ph.D. hab. is the sociologist and social anthropologist. She works as an associate professor in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw. Head of the Social Memory Laboratory (2018-2020). Her main interests are contemporary developments in ethnic and national identity and problems of social memory and tradition. She conducted her fieldwork in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and in the Siberian part of Russia. She published books and articles on ethnic minorities in Poland, ethnic identity and social memory in post-Soviet countries and on the memory of resettlements. Her last books are: Transmisja pamięci. Działacze “sfery pamięci” i przekaz o Kresach Wschodnich we współczesnej Polsce (Transmission of memory. Activists of „memory sphere” and transmission of the memory of former Eastern Borderlands in contemporary Poland), 2016, Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity. Local Communities, Religion and Historical Politics, 2019 (with Zuzanna Bogumił). In the ECHOES project, she participates in the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.

Márcia Chuva is a Brazilian historian, Associate Professor in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State – UNIRIO and Researcher of the National Council of Research (CNPq). Her main research interests focus on the history of heritage and memory policies, ethnographic museums and the restitution of cultural assets in postcolonial contexts. She is a member of the ECHOES - European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities Project http://projectechoes.eu/about/entangled-cities/, funded by the European Union – Horizon 2020 Program, coordinating the Brazilian team with the University of Coimbra. For more information, please access https://unirio.academia.edu/MárciaChuva

Dr. Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak is a linguist, a critical discourse analyst, and a diversity and inclusion trainer. She is the President of “Word Idea”, a training company for promoting diversity and cross-cultural communication, and combating racial discrimination, and the violation of human rights of people of African descent in Poland. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Wrocław. She graduated from the Black Europe Summer School and Dimensions of Citizenship, Race and Ethnic Relations. Margaret authored and co-authored lesson scenarios, educational materials and scientific publications on cross-cultural, human rights, anti-discrimination and global education topics.

Margaret Tali is a cultural theorist, art historian, and curator. She holds a Ph.D. from the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. Her research interests involve curating difficult and sensitive histories and histories of the art museum. She is the author of Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums (2018) and co-editor of Archives and Disobedience. Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe (2016, with Tanel Rander). She’s also the co- curator of the exchange, exhibition, and collective research project Communicating Difficult Pasts (2018-21, with Ieva Astahovska).

Maria Kobielska, Ph.D. is a memory scholar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, a member of the Research Center for Memory Cultures, of the Memory Studies Association, and of the Polish Association of Cultural Studies. She has written on contemporary Polish literature and culture in the context of memory, trauma, and politics. Her most recent book discusses Polish memory culture in the 21st century (Polska kultura pamięci: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny, 2016) and she is currently working on a research project that focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums.

Mariya Pavlenko is a visual artist from Kyiv currently living and working in Kyiv, Ukraine and Wroclaw, Poland. Pavlenko graduated from the MFA program “Art in Public Space and New Artistic Strategies”, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2017 and the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” in 2007. She works with wide range of topics, among which are politics, history, memory, language, architecture, modernity, nuclear energy, ecology, landscape and others. The practice of the artist balances between theory and practice and addresses mainly the issues of Eastern European context.

Senior lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Fribourg. As a specialist in the history of cultural diplomacy, I have focused my research on trans-bloc cultural relations during the Cold War. I have also published an illustrated monograph on the history of Warsaw (Varsovie métropole, 2016). Since 2014, I have developed several research projects in global history on student movements, especially in the socialist bloc. I also participate in a project on exchanges between Switzerland and Senegal in the field of museography and I am conducting a research on a postcolonial history of relations between Senegal and Switzerland.

Born in 1975. Writer, curator. Author of nonfiction books, at the beginning of 2009 his The eye of the world. From Constantinople to Istanbul, for which he received the Beata Pawlak Award, was published, followed in 2011 by Mosaic, Following the Rechowiczes. His last book (2020) is a fiction, novel Prince Polonia. Author and co-curator of the art projects: Global Prosperity (Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdańsk 2010), Migrating University of Mickiewicz (Istanbul 2014), Polish-Indian Shop/Prince Polonia (Warsaw Modern Art Museum, Bombay Clark House Initiative, Szczecin Trafo; 2017-2018). He co-founded the collective Masala Sound System. Laureate (together with Masala) of the award “Antifascist of the year 2004”.

Monika Stobiecka, assistant professor at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, historian of art and archaeologist. A fellow of the Lanckoroński Foundation (2016), the Kościuszko Foundation (2018) and the Foundation for Polish Science (2019). She is interested in museum studies, critical heritage studies and archaeological theory and methodology.

Naomi Recollet is Anishinaabe-kwe (Odawa/Ojibwe), Crane Clan from the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. She graduated from Carleton University in 2012 with a Master of Arts in Canadian Studies, and immediately began working for her community with the Wiikwemkoong Islands Claim Unit and later with the Wikwemikong Heritage Organization. This work experience influenced her decision to enroll in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. In November 2018, Naomi graduated with a Master of Museum Studies and a Master of Information (concentrating in archives and record management). Her research has also allowed her to travel to various museums to visit the collections at: Smithsonian Institution, Royal Ontario Museum, Fenimore Art Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum, British Museum, Milwaukee Public Museum, Musée de la Civilisation, and the Weltmuseum Wien. Naomi currently works at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation working with their extensive archival records and assisting with the development of programs & workshops.

Nelly Bekus, Associated Lecturer at University of Exeter, UK. She defended her Ph.D. in Sociology (2007) at the Polish Academy of Science, held research posts at Harvard University, the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, New York University, and worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw (2008-2012). She published monographs Struggle Over Identity: The Official and the Alternative Belarusianness (CEU Press 2010), co-authored Orthodoxy Versus Post-Communism? Belarus, Serbia, Ukraine, and the Russkiy Mir (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), and co-edited a special issue of International Journal of Heritage Studies ‘Heritage, Socialism and Internationalism’ (2020). Her publications also include over twenty articles and book chapters on urban heritage, nationalism, religious and linguistic identity, and social memory. Among her recent articles are “Agency of Internal Transnationalism in Social Memory”, British Journal of Sociology (2019), and “Transnational Circulation of Cultural Form: Multiple Logics of Heritage-Making” in the International Journal of Heritage Studies (2019).

Nicholas Boston is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), Lehman College. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge, and conducts research at the intersection of media, migration, race/ethnicity and sexuality. He is the author of The Amorous Migrant: Race, Relationships and Resettlement (forthcoming from Temple University Press), an 8-year ethnography of post 2004 gay-identified male Polish migrants to the United Kingdom. He has written about August Agboola Browne in the journal Central Europe (forthcoming), BBC News, and The Independent.

Wrocław-based art historian and curator, a lecturer at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław, the Head of Exhibitions Production at BWA Wrocław Galleries of Contemporary Art. Author of the book on institutional critique in Poland in years 2000-2010 (Krytyka instytucjonalna w Polsce w latach 2000-2010, Wrocław 2015) and numerous texts on contemporary art published in catalogues and art magazines.

Piro Rexhepi holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Strathclyde. His research focuses on decoloniality, sexuality, and Islam. His recent work on racism and borders along the Balkan Refugee Route has been published in a range of mediums in and out of academia including the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critical Muslims and The Guardian among others.

Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and visual artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario's most well-known work, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012), sought to denormalize the racist Dutch figure and practice of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). His current practice attempts to delink from gendered and Westernized artistic genealogies by working together with his family and family of friends. He has an academic background from Utrecht University in media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Gario received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), SMBA (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), Witte de With (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg). In 2017 he received a Humanity in Action Detroit Fellowship and he is a 2017/2018 BAK Fellow. Gario is a member of the collectives The State of L3 and Family Connection and is currently a participant of the Advanced Performance And Scenography Studies program in Brussels.

Rado Ištok is a curator, writer and editor from Slovakia based in Stockholm. He is the
curator of the European Cooperation Project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through
Creativity and Culture at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, within which he
curated artist residencies leading to the exhibition The Spectral Forest (2020) and the
workshop Dwelling on the Threshold (2019). He is also a co-founder of Spaces of Care,
Disobedience and Desire, a discursive research platform in collaboration with Marie-
Louise Richards and Natália Rebelo, supported by the artistic research funding of the
Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Director of the Research Center for Memory Cultures teaches at the Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies Department at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Co-founder of the Curatorial Collective. Specializes in criticism and theory, visual culture studies, and memory studies. Focuses on relations between images, sites, and memory, currently working on a project on non-sites of memory in Central and Eastern Europe.

Principal Investigator in projects:  Polish Folk Art and the Holocaust: Perpetrator-Victim-Bystander Memory Transactions in the Polish-German Context (Beethoven, NCN/DFG, Humboldt Univ., with Magdalena Waligórska, 2020-2023) Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe. The Role of Museums in a Digital “Post-Truth” European Society (Volkswagen, Humboldt Univ., PI: Christoph Bareither, 2020-2024). Co-curator of the exhibition Terribly Close. PolishVernacular Artists Face the Holocaust (2018-2019).

Head of the research project Awkward objects of genocide. Vernacular art on the Holocaust and ethnographic museums, developed within the project Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production (Horizon2020, Reflective Society, 2016-2019)  and of a project Uncommemorated Genocide Sites and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes, and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland (Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the National Programme for the Development of Humanities); 2016-2019. Awarded by Kościuszko Foundation, Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, ERSTE Stiftung, and  European Holocaust Research Infrastructure.

Mediator and Coordinator of Educational Services. National Ethnological Museum/DGPC, Lisbon.

Sara Herczyńska is a Ph.D. student in the Institute of Polish Culture in the University of Warsaw. Her thesis is about Polish biographical museums. She takes part in a research project about new Polish historical museums led by Dr. Maria Kobielska at the Jagiellonian University. She has published in Teksty Drugie (Second Texts), Przegląd Humanistyczny (Humanities Review), Widok (View), and others.

Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (or Linh) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. Prior to Linh’s relocation to Vienna she worked at the Global History Division at the Fredrich Meinecke Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin after earning her Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence in 2019. Linh is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first one is on the imbrications between unofficial everyday practices of care work and the sustainability of political mobilization within a left-leaning milieu of political dissidents in late socialist Warsaw. Linh’s second book project excavates the modes and patterns of exchange between Poland and Vietnam under late socialism through the prism of migration, socialist pedagogy, and cultural exchange.

I am an ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, and museum curator, as well as doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. My research focus is on the history and the aftermath of the non-aligned movement in former Yugoslavia with the emphasis on museum work. I am also interested in current trends in museology, increasing the accessibility of heritage in museums and particularly the inclusion of various social groups in museum work. At the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, I worked on the projects Accessibility of Cultural Heritage to Vulnerable Groups (2013-2015) and SWICH – Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage (2016-2018). Currently, I lead the EU project Taking Care. Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care which focuses on climate change.

Dr.Victoria Shmidt, a researcher at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz, SOEGA/SEEHA Center of Southeastern European History and Anthropology, focuses on the issue of race science in East-Central European countries as an indispensable part of building the nations. She leads the project “Race science: Undiscovered power of building the nations” aimed at exploring the role of intercountry cooperation among the scholars from CEE countries in disseminating racial thinking. Her recent publications shed light on the historical continuities in reproducing structural violence in the politics concerning people with disabilities and Roma in Central Europe.

Wayne Modest is professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies, in the Faculty of the Humanities at the Vrije Universitiet (VU) Amsterdam. He has held visiting academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania (Anthropology), New York University (Museum Studies), and Yale University (Center for British Art). In addition, he is founding director of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, Africa Museum Berg en Dal, and the Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam. The RCMC fosters research on ethnographic collections and museums, their complex histories and futures. Wayne Modest’s work is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to material culture/museum collections. His research interests include issues of belonging and displacement; material mobilities; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; difficult/contested heritage (with a special focus on slavery, colonialism, and post colonialism). More recently Modest has been researching and publishing on heritage and citizenship in Europe. In addition to his research, Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions including the most recent, What We Forget – Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, which explores the art making and the memory of colonialism in current discussions about European citizenship, its pasts, present, and futures.

Wojciech Szymański, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Modern Art and Culture at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw. He is an independent curator and art critic; member of the International Association of Art Critics AICA, author of the book Argonauci.Postminimalizm i sztuka po nowoczesności. Eva Hesse – Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Roni Horn – Derek Jarman [The Argonauts. Postminimalism and Art After Modernism: Eva Hesse – Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Roni Horn – Derek Jarman] (2015), as well as over 40 academic and 100 critical texts published in exhibition catalogs, art magazines, and peer-reviewed journals and monographs. He has curated over thirty group and solo shows and art projects held in Poland and abroad, including several exhibitions of Roma contemporary artists and Roma art.

Zofia Wóycicka, Ph.D., is a researcher at the German Historical Institute Warsaw. She studied history and sociology at the University of Warsaw and the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena. Wóycicka did her Ph.D. at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS). She worked at the Educational Centre of Polin – Museum of the History of Polish Jews (2007–2011), as an exhibition curator at the House of European History/Brussels (2011-2015), and as a researcher at the Centre for Historical Research Berlin of the PAS (1015-2019). Wóycicka authored amongst others Arrested Mourning. Memory of the Nazi Camps in Poland, 1944-1950 (2013). Her most recent publication is titled “Cultural Diplomacy in War Museums. The Case of the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Kalrshorst” (with David Clarke) History & Memory vol. 31, no. 2 Fall/Winter 2019.

Zoltán is a critical geographer and global historian. His research focuses on the historical relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South in the 19th and 20th centuries from a postcolonial and world-systemic perspective. He is a member of Karl Polanyi Research Centre for Global Social Studies (Corvinus University) and the Dialoguing Posts Network. Between 2015 and 2019, he was Assistant Researcher in the 1989 After 1989 and Socialism Goes Global research projects (University of Exeter). Currently, his Leibniz Science Campus EEGA Fellowship (Universität Leipzig) project Postcolonial Hungary explores Hungarian semiperipheral colonial history from a global historical, post/decolonialist and world-systemic perspective.