Dorota Glowacka

MA (Wroclaw), PhD (SUNY)

Dorota Glowacka received her PhD in comparative literature from State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Glowacka has taught critical theory, Holocaust and genocide studies and theories of gender and race in and Contemporary Studies Program since 1995. She also lectures in the Foundation Year Program and at Dalhousie University, where she has been cross-appointed to the graduate faculties of English, Gender and Women’s Studies, European Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is married to Zbigniew Glowacki and has two children, Maria and Jerome.

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]

Other Selected Professional Activity

• Member of the Academic Committee of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Organiser of the workshop “Trauma, Memory, Material Culture: A Dialogue Between National Museum of the American Indian and the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., May 2023 (SSHRC Connections Grant)
• Co-organiser (with USC Shoah Foundation and Indigenous Studies Program at The University of Winnipeg) of “Mass Violence Against Indigenous Peoples and it Legacies” Conference, Los Angeles, October 2022.
• Member of the SSHRC Partnership Development grant (2.5 mln) international partnership Thinking Through the Museum (2021-2028).
• Member of the SSHRC Insight grant Counter-Memory Activism (King’s-NSCAD Collaboration)
• Co-organiser of the Northwestern Education Foundation’s first European edition of Lessons and Legacies Holocaust Conference in Munich, November 2019.
• 2017 William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellow on America, the Holocaust, and the Jews. The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
• Member of the international group of scholars (Stephen Weinstein Holocaust Symposium at Wroxton College) that publishes books on the subject of the genocide.
• Coordinated four Contemporary Studies Lecture Series: 2010-2011, “Conceptions of Race in Philosophy, Literature, and Art”; 2005-2006, “Jacques Derrida: Legatee and Legacy” (with Dr. Elizabeth Edwards); 2000-2001, “Cyclops: Vision and Visuality into the 21st Century (with Dr. Bruce Barber), 1996-1997, “Between Ethics and Aesthetics.”
• Co-taught (with historian Atina Grossmann) the 2012 Silberman seminar for faculty on “The Gendered Experience of the Holocaust,” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Lectures internationally in the area of Holocaust and genocide studies in literary, artistic, and philosophical perspectives and Polish Jewish relations after the Holocaust; gives lectures and presentations at local institutions (Dalhousie, NSCAD) and community venues (Yom HaShoah commemorations, high schools).
• Recipient of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant for the project “Jewish Memory in Today’s Poland and the Polish National Narrative” (2006-2009).

Selected Publications

• Po tamtej stronie: Świadectwo, afekt, wyobraźnia [From the other side: testimony, affect, imagination]. Warsaw: Institute for the Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Science, 2017.
• Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics and Aesthetics (Washington University Press, S. Weinstein Series in Holocaust Studies, 2012).
• Co-editor with Regina Mühlhäuser) of a special issue on “Sexuality and the Holocaust” of Journal of Holocaust Research; forthcoming in 2023.
• Editor (with Joanna Zylinska) of Imaginary Neighbors:  Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2007).
• Editor (with Stephen Boos) of Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
• Guest editor of the special issue of Culture Machine, entitled “Community.” January 2006.
• “(Re)framing Gender: Representations of Female Bodies in Holocaust Photographs.” Forthcoming in A World Unmade: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941, edited by Valerie Herbert. University of Wisconsin Press and the USHMM (26 pages, forthcoming).
• “The Vanished World”: Cultural Genocide of Eastern European Jews through the Lens of Settler Colonial Studies.” European Holocaust Studies Vol. 4 (2022). Edited by Rachel O’Sullivan and Michelle Gordon. 31-60.
• “Sexual Violence Against Heterosexual Men During the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-so-Silent) Silence.” German History (3), 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. Edited by Anna Hájková and Birgid Bosold. 78-99.
• “Hide and Seek in Three Voices: Coming to Terms with the Father’s Story.” In Researchers Remember: Research as an Arena of Memory of Offspring of Holocaust Survivors, a Collected Volume of Academic Autobiographies, edited by Judith Baumel-Schwartz. New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021. pp. 259–271.
• “Gendered representations of beauty and the female body in Holocaust art” Forthcoming in Miejsce. Studia nad Sztuką i Architekturą XX i XXI Wieku [Place. Studies in art and architecture of the 20th and 21st century, Vol. 6, special issue “Historia sztuki w Polsce i zagłada Żydów” [The history of art in Poland and the Holocaust], edited by Luiza Nader and Piotr Składkowski, English language publication, Warsaw, Academy of Fine Arts.
• “Try to look. Try to see”: Nadine Fresco’s The Death of the Jews and the Ethics of Looking.” Introduction to the English translation of Nadine Fresco’s La mort des Juifs. Translated by Sarah Clift (Documenting Lives series, USHMM). Forthcoming in 2020.
• “Sexual Violence Against Heterosexual Men During the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-so-Silent) Silence.” German History (3), 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. Edited by Anna Hájková and Birgid Bosold. 78-99.
• “‘I am Polish on my Mother’s Side…’: A journey toward Becoming a Feminist Holocaust Scholar.” In Her Story, My Story? Writing About Women and the Holocaust. Edited by Judith Tydor Baumel and Dalia Offer. New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020. 271-284.
• “‘Traduttore traditore’: Claude Lanzmann’s Polish Translations.” The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoahand its Outtakes, eds. Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 141-174.
• “‘Never Forget’: Indigenous Memory of the Genocide and the Holocaust.” Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World. Edited by Shirli Gilbert and Avril Alba. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019. 386 – 418.
• “Gender and the Shoah: Relational Imagination and the Cul-de-sacs of Remembrance.” Lessons and Legacies 13 (2018). New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory. Edited by Alexandra Garbarini and Paul B. Jaskot. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. 310-334.
• „Doświadczenie Auschwitz i szara strefa wyobraźni”. Wielogłos o Zagładzie [A plurality of voices about the Holocaust]. Edited by Maria Anna Potocka. MOCAK [Kraków Museum of Modern Art] Press, 2018. 68-72.
• “The Tower of Babel: Holocaust Testimonials and the Ethics of Translation.” In Jewish Translation/Translating Jewishness. Edited by Magdalena Waligórska and Tara Kohn. De Guyter Press, 2018. 237-258.
• “The Archive and the Image: H.G. Adler’s Snapshots of Traumatic History.” Forthcoming in H.G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy. Edited by Sara Horowitz and Julia Creet. Northwestern University Press. 2016.
• “Speech Under Torture: Bearing Witness to the ‘Howl’.” Forthcoming in Trust in the World. Holocaust Scholars Reflect on Torture. S. Weinstein Series in Holocaust Studies. Ed. John K. Roth and Leonard Grob. University of Washington Press. 2016.
• „Wieża Babel. Świadectwa Holokaustu a etyka przekładu.” Transl. Zofia Ziemian. In Przekładaniec, special issue „Żydowskość w przekładzie.”  No. 29, 2015, 229 – 259.
• Jak wyobrazić sobie to, czego nie wiemy? Kobieca pamięć o Shoah, płeć i wyobraźnia „współczująca.”Kobiety i historia. Od niewidzialności do sprawczości. Ed. Katarzyna Bańewska et al. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego. 2015. 163-178.
• Miłość i strach, czyli afektywne aporie demokracji.” Pamięć i afekty. Ed. Zofia Budrewicz et al. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich, 2014: 63-84.
• “Don’t leave me, pal”: Witnessing Death in Semprún’s Buchenwald Narratives.” In A Critical Companion to Jorge Semprún. Edited by Ofelia Ferran and Gina Herrmann. Palgrave Macmillan. 2014: 91-106.
• „U podłoża obrazu: poetyckie figury pisma Brunona Schulza”. Bruno Schulz jako filozof i teoretyk literatury. Ed. Wiera Maniok. Drohobycz: Polonistyczne Centrum Naukowo-Informacyjne im. Igora Menioka. 2014. 286-302.
• “Philosophy in the Feminine and the Holocaust Witness: Sarah Kofman and Hannah Arendt.” Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust. Ed. Myrna Goldenberg and Amy H. Shapiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2014. 38-58.
• Quo vadis?  Ojczyzna, tożsamość wyobrażona i “mój malutki los.” Tożsamości wyobrażone. Ed. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir. Warsaw, 2013. 196-215.
• “In a Double Voice: Representations of the Holocaust in Polish Literature, 1980 – 2011.” Holocaust as Active Memory – the Past in the present. Ed. M.L. Seeberg, I. Levin and C. Lenz. Ashgate Academic. 2013: 45-67.
• “The Trace of the Untranslatable: Emmanuel Levinas and the Ethics of Translation,” PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (Vol 7, No 1, 2012).
• “Art and Community: Aesthetic Practice as Exposure to the Other.” Understanding the Stranger. Ed. Petra Schweitzer. Berlin: Lit Verlag. 2012. 155-176.
• “Representations of the Jewish Other in Post-communist Poland: Literary Perspectives.” POLIN: Journal of Polish-Jewish Relations. No. 24 (November 2011).
• “From Fear to Democracy:  Toward the Politics of Com-passion.”  Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community. Ed. Stella Gaon  (Manchester University Press, 2009).
• “Świadkowie wbrew sobie: strategie pamięci Holokaustu w twórczości plastycznej kobiet ‘drugiego pokolenia.’” Artmix: sztuka, feminism, kultura wizualna. (October 2009. Vol. 22 (12).
• “Negative Witnessing and the Perplexities of Forgiveness: Polish Jewish Contexts after the Shoah.” Essays on Levinas and the Law: A Mosaic, ed. Desmond Manderson.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Interests

Holocaust and genocide literature and art (special interests: gender and genocide; intersections of the Holocaust and settler colonial genocide in North America); continental philosophy; ethics and politics of memory; philosophy “after Auschwitz”; Polish-Jewish relations after the Holocaust; critical race theory, gender theory.