William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology; Weiser Family Professor in European and Eurasian Studies; Director of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia; Director of the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies.
About
Geneviève Zubrzycki is a comparative-historical and cultural sociologist who studies nationalism and religion; collective memory and national mythology; and aesthetics and politics.
Her first book, the award-winning The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006) analyzed the reconfiguration of the relationship between Polishness and Catholicism after the fall of communism. She did so by examining Poles' and Jews' conflicting memories of World War II, and the international conflict over the presence of Christian symbols at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was translated into Polish in 2014 (Nomos).
In her second book, Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016), Zubrzycki analyzed the discursive, ritual and visual genesis of a Catholic French-Canadian ethnic identity in the 19th century, and its transformation into a secular Québécois national identity in the second half of the 20th century. She extended her analysis to the present, investigating the role of Québécois nationalism in recent debates over immigration, the place of religious symbols in the public sphere, and the politics of cultural heritage—shedding light on similar debates elsewhere in the world. The book received multiple national and international awards and was translated into French and Polish.
Zubrzycki pursued her analysis of religion’s role in symbolic boundary-making in a third monograph, Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland's Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022). Primarily based on participant observation and interviews, the book analyzes the current revival of Jewish communities in Poland and non-Jewish Poles’ interest in all things Jewish. It was awarded the prestigious Wayne S. Vunich Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Book Award from the Polish institute of Arts and Sciences of America.
In addition to these three monographs, Zubrzycki has extended her theoretical thinking on the significance of visual culture and materiality in her edited volume National Matters: Materiality, Culture and Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2017) and is currently at work on a new book about the semiotics and aesthetics of nationalism.
