Katherine Lebow

My research explores the extraordinary impact of memoirs by ‘ordinary’ people (workers, peasants, the unemployed) in interwar Poland. Submitted as entries to memoir-writing contests, hundreds of ‘everyman autobiographies’ were gathered, published, and avidly discussed by sociologists and the public. Through an examination of these texts and the conversation they provoked, I hope to explore the deployment of life-writing in a variety of late-modern political, academic, and legal discourses.

My research explores the extraordinary impact of memoirs by ‘ordinary’ people (workers, peasants, the unemployed) in interwar Poland. Submitted as entries to memoir-writing contests, hundreds of ‘everyman autobiographies’ were gathered, published, and avidly discussed by sociologists and the public. Through an examination of these texts and the conversation they provoked, I hope to explore the deployment of life-writing in a variety of late-modern political, academic, and legal discourses.