Twentieth Century Polish History Seminar

Poland famously became ‘ethnically homogeneous’ during and immediately after the Second World War, as its previous minority populations were either killed during the Nazi occupation, forced to emigrate, and left outside of Poland’s post-1945 frontiers.  And yet, across the western half of the country, subsequent discussions of the remaining, ostensibly homogeneous population routinely used what seemed suspiciously like an ethnic grid to analyse it.  People were most often assigned one of three categories depending on their background, specifically their migration status:  native, settler, or refugee.  As in other contexts with such terms have structured public debates about community cohesion, these labels came with a host of stereotypes, both negative and positive.  In this talk, I will be examining how this kind of ethnic grid was used in discussion of postwar social integration.  Who was meant to integrate whom in this process of integration?

Jim Bjork is Professor of Modern European History at King’s College London.  He received his PhD at the University of Chicago and worked at various American universities before moving to the UK in 2005.  His research interests focus on the interplay between religion and nationality in Poland and Germany.  Jim’s first monograph was Neither German nor Pole:  Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland.  His current project examines migration and internal diversity within Catholic communities in Poland after the Second World War. Articles related to this current research have recently been published in the Journal of Modern History, German History, Central European History and various edited collections.

To register, visit https://www.tickettailor.com/events/polishuniversityabroadpuno