The Longue Durée of Social Structures: Post-feudal Perspectives on the Gentry’s Legacy in Poland and Ukraine

As part of the colloquium hosted by the Chair of East and Southeast European History at the University of Regensburg, Anna Wylegała from the Polish Academy of Sciences will give a lecture on 16 January 2025. Her talk will focus on her current research project "The Longue Durée of Social Structures: Post-Feudal Perspectives on the Gentry’s Legacy in Poland and Ukraine."

The vital and complex role of the landowning elites in the political, economic, and cultural history of Europe has been extensively researched. However, the question of how this role has been remembered since the dissolution of these elites as a social class, and what the implications of this memory and legacy are for contemporary European societies, has only recently begun to be addressed. Anna’s lecture focuses on her current research into the long durée of post-feudal social structures, that is the legacy and remembrance of (changing) material heritage, power relations, class dependencies, value systems, and violence. Based on her long-lasting fieldwork in Poland and Ukraine, Anna explores the role the landowning elites played in rural communities of what used to be the Polish Second Republic and during World War II, that is the way these elites ceased to exist and the way they are (not) remembered and commemorated today.

Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the social history of the II World War and the immediate postwar period. She is also interested in the qualitative methodology of social research, oral history and memory studies. She is author of "Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine" (2019) and "Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce" [There was an estate, there is no estate any more. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: "The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine" (2020), and "No Neighbors' Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe".

She will be a visiting researcher at the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America from 12–18 January 2025. She will be collaborating with Sabine Rutar (IOS Regensburg) and Natali Stegmann (UR), who have applied for ScienceCampus Seed Money, to develop research ideas relating to Graphic Novels as a Medium to Visualise Historical Experience of Mass Violence and Refuge. She will also discuss her research on Researching the Collection, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of war, as well as presenting the output from a previous project developed with Sabine Rutar on oral history.