Book Project: The People Write! Polish Everyman Autobiography from the Great Depression to the Holocaust
My new book project considers the production, circulation, and reception of “social memoir” in Poland in the crisis decade of the 1930s--autobiographical writings by workers, peasants, youth, the unemployed, typically gathered by sociologists through prize contests. Published collections of these memoirs became runaway best-sellers in Poland, won prestigious literary prizes, and sparked a grassroots culture of life-writing in milieus ranging from village self-education circles to Bundist youth groups. Polish sociologists, meanwhile, developed close relationships with American colleagues, implicating the “Polish method” of memoir-based research in intense struggles for methodological hegemony in U.S. social science in the late 1930s to mid-1940s. Historicizing the rise of “everyman narrative” in global perspective, The People Write! suggests the importance of tracing shifting deployments of personal narrative in twentieth-century scientific, legal, and political projects from nation-building to human rights. It also proposes that the theoretically innovative but largely forgotten “Polish method” prefigured more recent and better known scholarly efforts—oral history, legal and medical “storytelling movements,” auto-ethnography, e.g.—to foreground the voice and agency of ordinary people.
2013 "AQUILA POLONICA" ARTICLE PRIZE
The Polish Studies Association's 2013 Aquila Polonica prize for the "best English-language article published during the previous two years on any aspect of Polish studies" was awarded to my article based on this research: "The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights," Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3,3 (2012): 297-319. According to the jury, the article has "recovered an immensely significant yet almost entirely neglected set of sources, viewing them through a complex analytical lens of social rights and achieving thereby the rare feat of illuminating both the sources themselves and the lens through which they are viewed. Combining the interpretive skills of historian and textual critic, in her elegantly written article Lebow directs the attention of human rights theorists to the voices of working class Poles in the interwar years and to the meanings inherent in both the collection and the casual neglect of their writings. By publishing 'The Conscience of the Skin' in an interdisciplinary, transnational journal of human rights scholarship, Lebow clearly demonstrates that the study of Polish subjects can be of the broadest interest across the disciplines both within and beyond the spheres of Polish Studies."
Learn more about the Polish Studies Association here.
Learn more about the Polish Studies Association here.