Biography

Beata Halicka is a professor of contemporary history at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her research interests include nationalism, forced migrations, borderlands, memory culture and politics, German-Polish relations, Polish diaspora in the world. She is the author of eight books and has published numerous articles in academic journals and edited volumes. For the study The Polish Wild West. Forced Migration and Cultural Appropriation in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1945-1948 she received the 2016 Identities Prize for the best historical book in Poland. Her most recent book, Borderland’s Biography. Z. Anthony Kruszewski in Wartime Europe and Postwar America has been published in Polish (2019), English (2021) and German (2024).

Current research project: Polish Women in Postwar America.Female Agency,
Migration and Knowledge Transfer.
Women who left Poland during World War II and came to the United States in the postwar period brought with them significant experiences of war, occupation and forced migration. Many of them also witnessed the emancipation and changing roles of women in Poland during the interwar and wartime periods. In particular, well-educated women struggled to find their place in the still patriarchal American middle class in the late 1940s and 1950s. The goal of this project is to examine their agency and contributions to the social life of the Polish American community and society at large. The focus is on female journalists, writers, and scholars who have achieved professional success in the U.S.