dr hab. Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska is a historian and Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She specializes in 20th-century social and cultural history of the United States and Poland. Her areas of research include: women’s and gender history, transnational history of reproduction and public health, and history of social movements (particularly birth control, eugenic, and anti-abortion movements). Currently Professor Kuźma is the Principal Investigator in the National Science Center OPUS research grant “Polish Immigrant and Second Generation Women in the United States: Private and Intimate Lives (1890-1940)” and a Co-Investigator in the grant “Catholicizing Reproduction, Reproducing Catholicism: Activist Practices and Intimate Negotiations in Poland, 1930-present” also funded by the National Science Center OPUS grant.

Role at the ASC

Director for Students’ Affairs of the Institute of the Americas and Europe (IAiE) – Head of the Educational Unit

Achievements

The National Science Center, Poland; Principal Investigator, research grant for the project “Polish Immigrant and Second Generation Women in the United States: Private and Intimate Lives (1890-1940)”, 2020-2023

Kosciuszko Foundation research fellowship, Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, the United States; research project “Family, Home, and Beyond: Polish Immigrant Women in Chicago (1890s-1930s)”, Jan-Mar 2020

The National Program for the Development of the Humanities, Poland, Principal Investigator, research grant for the project: “American Philanthropic Activities in Interwar Poland and Their Impact on the Formation of Polish and Jewish public health system“, 2013-2017

Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland, scholarship for the most meritorious young scientists (Stypendium dla wybitnych młodych naukowców), 2012-2015

Fellowship (Visiting Professor), Nanovick Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, the United States, Aug- Dec 2012

Publications

with Agata Ignaciuk. “Family planning advice in state-socialist Poland, 1950s–1980s: Local and transnational exchanges” Medical History 2020, 64/2 (240-266).

“Marx or Malthus? Population Debates and the Reproductive Politics of State-socialist Poland in the 1950s and 1960s,” The History of the Family, Published online ahead of print: Dec 27, 2019.

„Railroad Workers, Civilization, and Communism: the Young Men’s Christian Association on the Interwar Polish Frontier,” European Journal of American Studies, 2018, 13/3.

Dziecko, rodzina i płeć w amerykańskich inicjatywach humanitarnych i filantropijnych w II Rzeczypospolitej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2018).

Zdrowe matki, chciane dzieci: ruch kontroli urodzeń w stanie Illinois, 1923-1941 (Warszawa: Neriton, 2009).

Courses (selected)

History of the United States II

American History and Society

History of Women in the United States

Histories of Reproduction in the United States

Key Methods in American Studies (history section)