– assistant Professor at the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław as part of the Fugue Program of the National Science Center. She graduated from the University of Warsaw with a degree from the Interfaculty Individual Studies in the Humanities program. She received her PhD at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, at the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Research.
She is the winner of numerous awards and scholarships, including a scholarship from the Foundation for Polish Science, a scholarship from the Minister of Science and Higher Education for outstanding young scientists, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Tokyo Foundation and a scholarship from the Institute of the History of Polish Jews and Israeli-Polish Relations (Tel Aviv). In 2016 she received the “Polityka” Historical Award for her work on the writings of Rachel Auerbach in the Warsaw Ghetto.
For many years she has lectured on the Yiddish language, literature, and culture at seminars and summer schools in Poland and abroad, including France, Lithuania, Ukraine and Australia. She has been a consultant for, among others, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN and the Museum of Art in Łódź. She co-authored the exhibition “Montage. Debora Vogel and the New Legend of the City” (Museum of Art in Łódź, 2017-2018). Szymaniak has been an organizer and co-organizer of numerous national and international conferences, most recently “Yiddishism: Mythologies and Iconographies” (Jewish Historical Institute, 2015). She is a member of the audit commission of the Polish Society for Yiddish Studies. Her scholarly interests include modern Yiddish literature, the problems of modernism and avant-garde literature written by women, as well as the history and theory of Polish-Jewish cultural contacts. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation and politics of memory. She is currently working on a project focusing on the history of Yiddish-Polish literary and cultural contacts in the 20th and 21st centuries.
karolina.szymaniak[at]uwr.edu.pl