

April 7th and 8th - The Polish 1920s were a period of both tremendous promise and profound dislocation. After years of devastating war and over a century of partition, Polish society embarked on a bold project of self-creation, a process of reunifying what had been divided and projecting broad outlines for future development that came to be seen as a kind of resurrection.
This international conference on The Roaring ‘20s in Poland brings together scholars of the interwar period to explore this pivotal decade in an interdisciplinary context.
Schedule below.
![]() |

04/07/14 - 04/08/14
9a-7p
Monday, April 7
8:30a Registration and Breakfast (Downstairs Lounge)
9:00a Welcome - Keynote: Kate Lebow (Main Stage Theatre)
“The Polish Scholar in Europe and America: Znaniecki, Chicago, and the Invention of Polish
Society in the 1920s”
10:15a Panel 1, New Stagings of Witkacy - Moderator: Karen Underhill (Main Stage Theatre)
Presenters: George Gasyna,“The Culture Industry of Iconoclasm: Witkacy’s Portrait-Painting Firm”
(UIUC); Jacob Juntunen,“’How Can We Tell a Human from a Brute?’ Tumor Brainiowicz as Witkacy’s
Post-Colonial Nightmare” (Southern Illinois University); Michał Paweł Markowski, “Idle Talk:
Witkacy, Heidegger, and the Void of Existence” (UIC)
10:15a Panel 2, Poland’s Youth - Moderator: Keely Stauter-Halsted (Downstairs Studio Theatre)
Presenters: Melissa Hibbard, “Nurturing Newborn Poland: Infant Health and Maternal Authority in the
Early Second Republic” (UIC); Magdalena Kozłowska, “’Arayn in Tsukunft!’ Building the Future of Jewish
Youth in Interwar Poland” (Jagiellonian University, Kraków); Sean Martin, “The Modernization of Jewish
Child Welfare in Poland” (Western Reserve Historical Society)
12:00 Lunch (Downstairs Lounge)
1:00p Panel 3, Senses of the Avant-Garde - Moderator: Michał Paweł Markowski (Main Stage)
Presenters: Agnieszka Jeżyk, “The King and His Vassal. The Paradox of Tadeusz Peiper’s Erotic Poetry”
(UIC); Aleksandra Kremer, “Materiality of Polish Avant-Garde Verse” (University of Warsaw);
Karen Underhill “The Devil in Warsaw: Interwar Roots of Aleksander Wat’s Aesthetics of Empathy”(UIC)
1:00p Panel 4, Gender - Moderator: Małgorzata Fidelis (Downstairs Studio Theatre)
Presenters: David Petruccelli, “The Polish Women’s Police and the International Fight against the Traffic
in Women” (Yale); Meghann Pytka, “Poland’s Prohibition: Teetotaler, Antisemites, and Rightwing
Feminists in their War on Liquor in the 1920s” (Southern Illinois University); Błażej Warkocki, “Roaring
from the closet? Crisis of homo/heterosexual definition in Polish literature at the beginning of XX century”
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
3:00p Stefan and Lucy Hejna Annual Lecture - Keynote: Beth Holmgren (Main stage)
“From the Legs Up: The Fall and Rise of the Chorus Girl in Warsaw’s Roaring ‘20s”
4:15p Panel 5, Places, Homes, Institutions - Moderator: Nathaniel Wood (Downstairs Studio Theatre)
Presenters: Winson Chu “’They are now sitting in their own homes’: Newly Independent Poland through the
Works of Joseph Roth and Alfred Doblin” (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Tony Lin, “The Institution of
the International Chopin Piano Competition and Its Social and Political Implications” (University of California,
Berkley); Adrian Smith, “Navel of the World: Zakopane as a microcosm of Poland’s blossoming national life in
the 1920s”
4:30p Film Screening 1: - Cud nad Wisłą (1921), Dir. Ryszard Bolesławski (Main Stage)
6:00p Film Screening 2: - Mogiła nieznanego żołnierza (1927), Dir. Ryszard Ordyński (Main Stage)
7:30p Dinner Reception (Downstairs Lounge)
Tuesday, April 8
8:30a Breakfast (Downstairs Lounge)
9:00a Keynote: Marcin Giżycki - "‘The Tenth Muse’: Polish Cinema of the 1920s” (Main stage)
10:15a Panel 6, Nation in the Making - Moderator: Winson Chu (Main stage)
Presenters: Paul Brykczynski, “Reconsidering Polsudskiite Nationalism at the Dawn of the Second
Republic” (University of Michigan); Kyrill Kunakhovich, “Staging the Nation: Krakow’s Slowacki Theater
under the Second Republic” (Harvard); Agnieszka Pasiek, “Making an ethnic group. The case of Rusyns
in Interwar Poland” (Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw)
10:15a Panel 7, Economies of Movement, Movements of Economy - Moderator: TBA (Downstairs Studio)
Presenters: Michał Kłosiński,“’The sphere of money’ or the Problem of Economy in Polish Poetry of the 1920s”
(University of Silesia, Katowice); Przemysław Strożek, “America – the Mill of Life. The Roaring Twenties
and the Polish Leftist Avant-garde” (Institute of Art Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa); Nathaniel
Wood, “From ‘Love of Machines’ to ‘Automobile Orgies’: Motoring in Interwar Poland” (Univ of Kansas)
12:00 Lunch (Downstairs Lounge)
1:00p Panel 8, Boundaries of Polishness: Incorporating the Other - Moderator: Karen Underhill (Main Stage)
Presenters: Rachel Brenner, “Stansilaw Rembek’s Interwar Fiction: The Role of the Jew in the Romantic Ethos
of Polish Heroism and Messianism” (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Kathryn Ciancia, “Poland as a
Civilizing Power? Polish Encounters in the 1920s Eastern Borderlands” (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
1:00p Panel 9, Here and There - Moderator: Katherine Lebow (Downstairs Studio Theatre)
Presenters:Andrzej Michałczyk, “Governing Upper Silesia in the 1920s” (Ruhr-University Bochum)
Petro Nungovitch “Wawel in the Twenties: The National Pantheon in the First Decade of National
Independence” (New York University); John Radzilowski, “Orphans of the ‘New Poland’ Polish Americans,
the Second Republic, and the Creation of a Diasporic Identity, 1919-1929” (University of Alaska Southeast)
3:00p Keynote: Piotr Rypson - “Tadeusz Peiper - from Madrid to Kraków: the Making of the Pope of the
Avant-garde” (Main stage)
4:15p History Roundtable - Topic: New Directions in Historical Research on Poland’s 1920s. (Studio Theatre)
Chair: Keely Stauter-Halsted
Discussants: Winson Chu, Kate Lebow, Sean Martin, Nathaniel Wood
6:00p Literature Roundtable - Topic: Why the 1920s? The Beginnings of Independent Culture in Poland.
(Studio Theatre)
Chair: Michał Paweł Markowski
Discussants: Marcin Giżycki, Beth Holmgren, Piotr Rypson
7:30p Closing Reception (Downstairs Lounge)
Director
Keely Stauter-Halsted and Michal Pawel Markowski
Performers
Rachel Brenner (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Paul Brykczynski (University of Michigan); Winson Chu (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Kathryn Ciancia (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Małgorzata Fidelis (UIC); George Gasyna (UIUC); Marcin Giżycki; Melissa Hibbard (UIC); Beth Holmgren (Duke University); Agnieszka Jeżyk (UIC); Jacob Juntunen (Southern Illinois University); Michał Kłosiński (University of Silesia, Katowice); Magdalena Kozłowska (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) ; Aleksandra Kremer (University of Warsaw); Kyrill Kunakhovich (Harvard); Kate Lebow (Cornell University); Tony Lin (University of California, Berkley); Michał Paweł Markowski (UIC); Sean Martin (Western Reserve Historical Society); Andrzej Michałczyk (Ruhr-University Bochum); Petro Nungovitch (New York University); Agnieszka Pasiek (Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw); David Petruccelli (Yale); Meghann Pytka (Southern Illinois University); John Radzilowski (University of Alaska Southeast) ; Piotr Rypson; Adrian Smith ; Przemysław Strożek (Institute of Art Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa); Karen Underhill (UIC); Błażej Warkocki (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań); Nathaniel Wood (University of Kansas)
Tags: Literary, Polish, , 2014

