Elżbieta Kwiecińska
Research Fellow
Vita
Elżbieta Kwiecińska is a lecturer in Ukrainian and Polish history at the University of Warsaw. She received a PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence. Elzbieta holds three masters degrees from the University of Warsaw: in history, law and sociology. She studied also at the New York University and held a few fellowships: at the Centre for Urban History in Lviv, at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Visehrad Fellowship) and German Historical Institute in Warsaw. Elzbieta currently works as a mentor at the Invisible University for Ukraine, Central European University, and conducts interviews with Ukrainian refugees in Poland for the project “24.02.2022, 5, am: Testimonies from the War”.
Research Project
During her stay in Berlin as an EUTIM fellow, Elzbieta will work on turning her thesis into a book. Her work is titled “A Civilising Relay. The Concept of the Civilising Mission as a ‘Cultural Transfer’ in East Central Europe, 1815-1919”. It answers the question of how the Western colonial concept was transferred, appropriated and contested to East-Central Europe as a German civilising mission to Poland and Slavdom; a Polish civilising mission to Ukraine and kresy; and Ukrainian and Polish civilising missions to Russia. Following Edward Said, each of the countries found its ‘barbarian’ counterpart in the eastern neighbor. The main argument of the future book is that a colonial argument of the ‘civilising mission’ had a mostly compensatory character to claim one’s own Westernhood.