Dr. Marta Kurkowska-Budzan

Professional Background

Dr. Marta Kurkowska-Budzan received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in history from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was Lecturer at the same university. For her Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship, Dr. Kurkowska-Budzan conducted research for her project “Facing Jedwabne: Memory and Responsibility.”

Dr. Marta Kurkowska-Budzan’s scholarship focuses on historical methodology, historiography, and European social history. As an undergraduate at Jagiellonian University, her studies concentrated in sociology and the anthropology of inter-et​hnic relations. She has received grants to conduct research in the United States and England. In 2001, Dr. Kurkowska-Budzan was awarded a fellowship by the Remarque Institute in New York. Prior to that, she was a fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury where she researched her doctoral thesis, “‘History of the People’: English Social Historiography, 1945-1997.”

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Museum, Dr. Kurkowska-Budzan reconstructed the history and contemporary events in Jedwabne and investigated the town as a central theme in Poland’s current discourse of Holocaust guilt and responsibility. She utilized the Museum’s archival sources on the Jedwabne region as well as the oral histories of Polish-Jewish survivors.

Dr. Kurkowska-Budzan was in residence at the Mandel Center from July 1 to September 1, 2002.