MALGORZATA FIDELIS
Associate Professor of History
Email: gosia01@uic.edu
curriculum vitae (pdf)
Malgorzata Fidelis teaches courses on Modern European, Eastern European, Polish, and Gender history.
Her research focuses on social and cultural issues, particularly everyday life and the relationship between individuals and state power, in post-1945 Eastern Europe. Her first book, Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge University Press, 2010), is a study of female workers and communist policies in Poland. The book's central theme explores how communist leaders and society reconciled pre-communist traditions with radically new norms imposed by the communist ideology.
Her new research project concerns the social and cultural history of the “Sixties” in the Eastern Bloc, with a particular emphasis on youth and student cultures in a transnational context.
Recent publications include:
“Red State, Golden Youth: The Student Culture and Political Protest in Poland in the 1960s,” in Between the Avant Garde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1958-2008, edited by Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 145-153.
“Recovering Women’s Voices in Communist Poland,” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 107-124.
“Are You a Modern Girl? Consumer Culture and Young Women in 1960s Poland,” in Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, edited by Shana Penn and Jill Massino (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 171-184.
"Equality through Protection: The Politics of Women's Employment in Postwar Poland, 1945-56,” Slavic Review (63:2).