Diana Sacilowski, a graduate teaching assistant in Slavic Languages and Literatures, is one of only seven graduate U of I students awarded an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) fellowship for her project, “Strategies of Silence: Representations of Jewish Poles in Polish Literature since the 1980s.”
In her project she is examining silence in Polish cultural texts since the 1980s that deal with Poland’s Jewish history.
“Although there has been a growing interest in Poland’s Jewish past during the last 40 years,” she commented, “many texts from this period treat the subject with some form of reticence. Writers sometimes avoid certain words or gloss over difficult historical realities, for example.”
Sacilowski said that she wants to understand the reasons for and methods of such instances of silence, examining what they say and what implications they may have on representations of Jewish history and people in Polish culture. She is analyzing how instances of silence employed by Polish artists of this period are used to represent Jewish characters, whether or not they complicate long-standing cultural stereotypes regarding Jewish Poles, and how, and if, they change the conception of Jewish Poles, from inherently “other” to an intrinsic part of Polish culture and history.
“Ultimately, my project tries to understand certain strategies for the representation of individuals excluded from normative conceptions of community and looks at silence, both its potential and its limitations, as a means of reconfiguring narratives of identity to be more inclusive.”
During spring semester she is teaching Polish 102 and 202. She also is pursuing a graduate student certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies within the Program in Jewish Culture and Society.