She teaches courses on Modern European, Eastern European, Polish and Gender history. Her research focuses on social and cultural issues, particularly everyday life and the relationship between individuals and state power in post-1945 Eastern Europe. Her first book, entitled Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Polish language edition, WAB, 2015), is a study of female workers and communist policies in Poland. The book’s central theme explores how communist leaders and society reconciled pre-communist traditions with radically new norms imposed by the communist ideology. Her new research project concerns the social and cultural history of the ‘Global Sixties’ in Poland, with a particular emphasis on youth and student cultures in a transnational context.

Selected Publications:

• ‘Communism and Its Legacy’, in The Routledge History of East Central Europe since 1700, edited by Irina Livezeanu and Arpad von Klimo, co-authored with Irina Gigova (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 365–414
• ‘Pleasures and Perils of Socialist Modernity: New Scholarship on Postwar Eastern Europe’, Contemporary European History 25 no. 4 (2016):1–12, doi:10.1017/S096077731600031X
• ‘Jugend, Moderne und the Welt. Die polnische Jugend an der Schwelle der Long Sixties. Historische Betrachtungen’, invited article in Nouvelle Vague Polonaise? Auf der Suche nach einem flüchtigen Phänomen der Filmgeschichte, edited by Margarete Wach (Marburg: Schüren, 2015), 80–100
• ‘The Other Marxists: Making Sense of International Student Revolts in Poland in the Global Sixties’, invited article for a thematic issue on Fear and Fascination: War, Enemies, and the Other in the Soviet Bloc through the 1950s, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 62 (2013): 425–49
• ‘Red State, Golden Youth: The Student Culture and Political Protest in Poland in the 1960s’, in Between the Avant-Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1958–2008, edited by Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 145–53