Magdalena Waligórska

PD Dr. Magdalena Waligórska is a cultural historian based at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her fields of interest include: contemporary Polish and Belarusian history, Jewish heritage and Holocaust history. She is currently leading an ERC-research group devoted to the history of Holocaust dispossession in East-Central Europe. 

She has published extensively on Jewish culture, Jewish-non-Jewish relations and nationalism. She is the author of »Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany«, Oxford University Press, 2013 and »Cross Purposes: Catholicism and the Political Imagination in Poland«, Cambridge University Press, 2023. The newest book she co-authored, »The Shtetl after 1945« (forthcoming 2026), tells the story of Eastern European small towns that had significant Jewish populations before the Holocaust and faced turbulent social changes in its aftermath.