Mazurek, Malgorzata

Associate Professor of Polish Studies

Office Hours

Fall 2024: ON LEAVE

Education

Ph.D. – Warsaw University, 2008
M.A. – Warsaw University, 2004 (Sociology)
M.A. – Warsaw University, 2003 (History)

 

Interests and Research

Małgorzata Mazurek specializes in modern history of Poland and East Central Europe. Her interests include history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in the twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with history of social inqualities under state socialism, and articles on labor, consumption, and history of human and social sciences in twentieth-century east central Europe. Her current book project Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918-1968 revises the history of developmental thinking by centering east-central Europe as the locality of innovations in economic thought in post-imperial Europe and the postcolonial world. It investigates the role of Warsaw-based social scientists in shaping Eastern European debates on population, migration and capitalism and further, in transforming this locally produced knowledge into development policies for the so-called “Third World.”  In 2014-2018 she has also been a also a member of an international research project Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third World’ 1945-1991 funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.

She has recently wrote about the idea of full-employment in interwar Poland for American Historical Review;  history of social sciences for a survey handbook The Interwar World, and about university as the Second-Third World space in the Cold War for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey.

Courses

  • Contemporary Civilization I and II
  • Other Europe: Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe in a Global Perspective (Graduate Reading Seminar)
  • Twentieth-Century Poland in Personal Accounts
  • Empire and Nation-Building: Eastern and Central Europe (Global Core)
  • Culture in Polish Lands
  • Everyday Communism
  • Senior Thesis Seminar
  • Graduate Historiography
  • Eastern Europe in a Global Perspective
  • Free/Unfree Labor
  • History of Social Sciences (Graduate Seminar)
  • Fin-de-Siècle Europe

 

Selected Awards

  • 2018 Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant for a project "Structuring the World: the Science of Interconnectedness from Natural History to Social Statistics, 1780s-1930s"
  • Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Award, Columbia University, 2017-18
  • Visiting Professor, Sciences Po Paris, May-June 2017
  • Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant (2015-18) for the collaborative research project Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’ 1945-1991
  • Marie Curie Fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Columbia University, 2012-2014
  • Chercheur invité at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, 2010

Publications

Books

Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918-1968 (under contract with Cornell University Press)

Waiting in Lines: On Experiences of Scarcity in Postwar Poland, 2010 (in Polish).

Socialist Factory: Workers in  People’s Poland and in the GDR on the Eve of the Sixties, 2005 (in Polish).

 

Scholarly Articles

"Social Sciences,” in: Andrew W. Denning and Heidi J.S. Tworek (eds), The Interwar World (Routledge, 2024), pp. 386-403

 

"The University: The Decolonisation of Knowledge?: The Making of the African University, the Power of the Imperial Legacy, and the Eastern European Influence,” in: Kristin Roth-Ey (ed.), Socialist  Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular. Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 119-138                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
"From Gold Standard to an Idea of Full-Employment. Facing Deglobalization in Post-Versailles Poland," American Historical Review, Vol. 128, Issue 2, June 2023 [part of the AHR History Lab section: "A World of Contradictions: Globalization and Deglobalization in Interwar Europe" curated by Tara Zahra and Peter Becker, pp. 703-881]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

“Dishonest Saleswomen: Gender, Workplace Theft and Institutionalization of Public Mood under State Socialism,” (in:) Marsha Siefert and Susan Zimmermann, (eds.), Labor in State Socialist Europe after 1945: Contributions to a History of Work (Budapest: CEU Press 2019).

Measuring Development: An Intellectual History of Ludwik Landau’s Scale of World Inequality,” Contemporary European History, no. 2 (28), Spring 2019, pp. 156-171.

(co-curated with Katherine Lebow and Joanna Wawrzyniak) “Making Modern Social Science: Global Imagination in East Central and South Eastern Europe after Versaille” special issue, Contemporary European History, No.2, vol. 28, (2019)

“Polish Economists in Nehru’s India: Making Social Science for the Third World in an Era of de-Stalinization,” Slavic Review, 77, no. 3 (Fall 2018), pp. 588-610

“Rewizyta: jak wytwarza się wiedzę socjologiczną” [On Creation of Sociological Knowledge: Self-Reflexive Reassessment of an Ethnographic Revisit], Kultura i Społeczeństwo [Culture and Society] (published in issue no. 3, 2015).

“Morales de la consommation en Pologne (1918-1989)/Moralities of Consumption across the Short Twentieth Century” Annales. Histoire, Science Sociales, No. 2, avril-juin 2013, p. 499-527.
For English version, click here.

(with Paul Betts) “Preface: When Rights Were Social,” special dossier on social rights, Humanity. An International  Journal of Human Rights of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development, Vol. 3, Issue 3, Fall 2012.

“Keeping it Close to Home: Resourcefulness and Scarcity in Late Socialist and Post-Socialist Poland,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012, p. 404-435.

“Figures de la débrouillardise en temps de crise en Pologne,” in Fragments du communisme en Europe Centrale ed. Rose-Marie Lagrave, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2011, p. 113-138.

“From Welfare-State to Self-Welfare: Everyday Opposition among Textile Female Workers, Lodz 1971-1981,” in Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Global Perspectives ed. Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011, p. 278-300.

“Between Sociology and Ideology: Perception of Work and Sociologist Advisors in Communist Poland, 1956-1970” Revue d’histoire en sciences humaines, (Dossier: Quelle sociologie derrière le „rideau de fer”?), Vol. 16, No. 1, 2007, p. 11-32.

(with Matthew Hilton) “Consumerism, Solidarity and Communism: Consumer Protection and Consumer Movement in Poland,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2007, p. 315-43.

X