Aleksandra Szczepan

Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (Projektstelle, Leibniz Gemeinschaft)

Aleksandra Szczepan is a cultural scholar with MAs in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she is a co-founder of the Research Center for Memory Cultures. She completes her doctoral graduation in October 2023.

Szczepan’s research interests include Holocaust literature and memory, decoloniality with regard to East-Central Europe, oral history, the Roma Holocaust, and space-based testimonial practices of witnesses to the Holocaust. She has taken part in several research projects, most recently “Uncommemorated Sites of Genocide in Poland” (2016-2020), for which she coedited the volume Non-Sites of Memory: Necrotopographies (in Polish, 2021). She has also worked as a researcher and interviewer in oral history projects undertaken by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Poland, Spain, and Kazakhstan.

Her recent English-language publications include “Necrocartography: Topographies and Topologies of Non-Sites of Memory” (with Kinga Siewior in Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1, 2021) and “Terra Incognita? Othering East-Central Europe in Holocaust Studies.” (in European Holocaust Studies book 4, 2022). She is currently working on a book project “Intimate Cartographies: Map as Holocaust Testimony” which proposes thinking about the significance of maps as testimonies in Holocaust research.

Szczepan has received scholarships from various institutions, including the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, and the Polish National Science Centre.

At the University of Potsdam, Szczepan works as a post-doc researcher on the project “You will never walk alone? Civil and military imageries of Polish popular culture since the 1980s”, within the joint research project “Adjustment and Radicalization: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe”, a research initiative of the Professorship for Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZFF).