Exploring the lost world of "interwar Poland"

September 6th 2013 Simon Kuran
Arts & Humanities
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Kathryn Ciancia didn't study Eastern European history as an undergraduate at Oxford University. But, with her grandfather’s tales of growing up in interwar Poland in the back of her mind, Ciancia took a job as an English language teacher in the unfamiliar country.

“I quickly became hooked,” says Ciancia, who was captivated by the ethnic and religious diversity of the area — now part of Ukraine — that was the Second Polish Republic between the two world wars.

Now, Ciancia studies the area as an assistant professor in the UW-Madison Department of History, which she joined this fall after getting her Ph.D. and teaching as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

A native of Liverpool, England, Ciancia says she is a diehard fan of English Premier League soccer club Liverpool and is looking forward to “finally getting to grips with the rules of American football” by attending her first Badgers game at Camp Randall. She also told us about her interdisciplinary work, her love of cheese and more.

Ciancia Ciancia

Q: Tell us about your research interests.
A: I am interested in how ideas of Polish national identity between the two world wars shaped — and were shaped by — encounters in Poland’s multiethnic eastern borderlands. Drawing on environmental history and historical geography, I look at how physical places — state borders, marshlands, village houses, and city streets — were connected to imagined hierarchies of civilization between Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and others.

Q: What courses will you teach?
A: I’ll be teaching two undergraduate courses in the fall semester: a lecture class on 20th-century Eastern Europe and a seminar on experiences of mass violence in Europe between 1900 and 1950.

Q: If you weren't in your field or academia, what would you be doing?
A: When I was younger, I wanted to be a journalist and even did some work experience at the BBC in London. I was attracted by the idea of writing about the human stories behind the news, putting current events in their historical context, and traveling off the beaten track. As it turns out, there are many similarities with the work of the historian, and although I cannot meet the people I study face-to-face, my job is to reconstruct their stories through the sources that I find in the archives.

Q: What did you know about Madison before coming here?
A: Everything that I heard about Madison was positive; in fact, people seemed very envious of the fact that I was moving here! I knew that it was an open-minded place with lots of cultural activities and, of course, that it specialized in making cheese, one of my favorite foods.

Q: What’s your favorite food?
A: I am pretty adventurous when it comes to trying new foods, and one of things that I like about the U.S. is the great variety in dishes from all around the world. Having spent time in Poland, I am a big fan of some of their staple dishes, including beetroot soup (barszcz) and stuffed cabbage leaves (gołąbki), but I have to say that on a Sunday you can’t beat a British roast dinner!

To meet more new faculty members, see our full list of Q&As.