Dr. Barbara Milewski

Professional Background

Barbara Milewski received her doctorate in musicology from Princeton University, a master’s degree in music history from SUNY Stony Brook, and a bachelor’s degree in government and legal studies from Bowdoin College. Currently, she is the Daniel Underhill Professor of Music in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College.

A Polish music specialist, Dr. Milewski has lectured extensively on questions of nationalism, national identity, and memory in the music of Chopin; songs created in the Nazi concentration camps; and the music of Poland's iconic postwar film, Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden Songs, 1947), for which she also created the complete English subtitles for the original uncensored version of the film. Her scholarship has appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, reference works, recent scholarly volumes examining postwar musical commemoration. With Bret Werb, she produced an annotated compact disc of archival recordings, Aleksander Kulisiewicz: Ballads and Broadsides. Her translations of Polish songs for that recording, as well as for Thomas Pasatieri's song cycle Letter to Warsaw, and Paul Schoenfield's Camp Songs, have brought wider attention to the remarkable repertoire of topical songs created in the Nazi camps. She recently contributed to the BBC's The Documentary podcast, "Songs from the Depths of Hell," narrated by presenter Alan Dein, and the French public radio France Culture podcast, "Le barde des Enfers."

Dr. Milewski’s work has been supported by fellowships and prizes awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright (Poland), the American Musicological Society (Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship), the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (2001-02 Fellow), the U.S. Department of Defense, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and the Kosciuszko Foundation. She is also the recipient of two distinguished teaching awards from Swarthmore College.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Barbra Milewski was awarded a Joyce and Arthur Schechter Fellowship for her book project, “The Corpse Carrier’s Tango and Other Songs of the Living.” Using a case study approach, Dr. Milewski’s work integrates archival research and oral history to tell how three Polish nationals imprisoned in three camps created music for themselves and their fellow inmates. It is an original historiographic contribution to the intersecting fields of musicology, World War II history, and Holocaust studies that reconstruct distinct communal cultures of song composition, transmission, and musical performance. The work illuminates how and why prisoners cultivated empathy, brokered trust, and weighed impossible choices to participate in a shared musical life under persecution, exploitation, and extermination conditions. It also extends the temporal boundaries of this music-making, linking it to both prewar musical culture and postwar spaces of remembrance and community in Poland and beyond.

This fellowship allows her to work with the Museum’s Aleksander Kulisiewicz Collection, an extraordinary archive of sound recordings, music, oral histories, letters, and related artwork that is the largest extant collection of music composed in the camps.

Residency Period: September 1, 2023–December 31, 2023