Dr. Katarzyna Taczyńska

Professional Background

Katarzyna Taczyńska is the lead researcher and manager of the project “Jewish, Balkan, Female: The Literature of Balkan Jewish Women as a Minority Experience” at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Dr. Taczyńska received a PhD in literary studies from Nicolaus Copernicus University, where she studied gender studies, art history, Jewish studies, and Slavic, Polish, and Balkan philology.

Dr. Taczyńska has participated in several research projects, serving as the manager of “The Memory of/about Violence: The Cultural History of Women in the Serbian and Croatian Historical and Literary Discourse in the Twentieth Century” and as a researcher on “When Nationalism Fails: A Comparative Study of Holocaust Museums in Ex-Collaborationist Countries.” (University College Dublin, Gerda Henkel Foundation, 2022-2024). 

Dr. Taczyńska’s book, Dowcip trwający dwa i pół roku. Obraz Nagiej Wyspy w serbskim dyskursie literackim i historycznym końca XX i początku XXI wieku (“A Joke That Stretched for Two and a Half Years: The Portrait of Goli Otok in Serbian Literary and Historical Discourse at the End of the 20th and the Beginning of the 21st Century”) was published in Polish by Wydawnictwo DiG in 2016. She has also published in several academic journals, including the European Journal of Jewish Studies, Heritage & Society, and Aspasia.

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Manya Friedman Memorial Fellow, Katarzyna Taczyńska will conduct research on postwar narratives of the Holocaust from the (post-)Yugoslav region through the contrasting symbols of the doll and the soldier, drawn from Đorđe Lebović’s play Vojnik i lutka. Her project explores how individual narratives, often marginalized in dominant memory (symbolized by the doll), are positioned within the heroic memory (symbolized by the soldier) that prevailed in postwar Yugoslavia. This project will focus on the semantics and symbolic constructs of various works, including video and written testimonies, literary representations, and photographs. Focusing on form, language, and symbolism, the study challenges established perceptions and offers a nuanced understanding of the Holocaust in the Yugoslav region.

Residency Period: June 1, 2026–July 31, 2026