Dr. Aleksandra Szczepan

Aleksandra Szczepan studied comparative literature and philosophy and obtained her PhD in literary studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków where she is also a co-founder of the Research Center for Memory Cultures. In 2016-2020, she worked as a researcher in a project dedicated to uncommemorated sites of genocide (non-sites of memory) in Poland. In 2018-2023, she participated in oral history projects by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum interviewing survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust in Poland, Spain and Kazakhstan. In 2023-2026, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in the project »Adjustment and Radicalization: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe«, funded by the Leibniz Gemeinschaft, working on the subproject »You will never walk alone? Civil and military imageries of Polish popular culture since the 1980s.« She has received scholarships and grants from various institutions, including the USHMM, New York Public Library, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Polish Ministry of Culture and Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. 

Her recent publications include among others the critical edition of testimony of Romani survivor Krystyna Gil for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, an article on Holocaust maps in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a special issue of the Polish literary journal Teksty Drugie dedicated to the memory of hope in postwar Poland.

Aleksandra Szczepan has been a researcher at the GWZO in the department »Knowledge and Participation« since November 2025. 

• Holocaust testimony

• Critical cartography of the Holocaust

• Memorialisation of Romani Holocaust

• Representations of WW2 in Polish popular culture

• Civil solidarities in Polish literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries

• Member of the Research Centre for Memory Cultures (Jagiellonian University in Kraków)

• Member of the Holocaust Culture Network (Penn State University / University of Jena)

• Member of the research group »Mass Graves of the Holocaust« (German Historical Institute in Warsaw)

• Member of the »Popular Dynamics« platform (ZfL in Berlin)

Aleksandra Szczepan has taught courses on popular culture, Holocaust testimony and literary theory at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the University of Potsdam.