Urszula (Ula) Madej-Krupitski

Urszula (Ula) Madej-Krupitski is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. She received two MA degrees: one from Jagiellonian University, Poland and one from UC Berkeley. Besides her native Polish, she knows Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and German. She has been offered grants and fellowships from research institutions in the United States, Europe and Israel.

While on a 4-month GEOP Research Fellowship, Ula will be working on her doctoral project entitled Mapping Jewish Poland: Material Culture, Everyday Life and Identity Negotiations in the Interwar Period. Her work explores links between materiality, consumption, leisure practices and identity for Jews during the interwar Poland.

In order to account for the range of leisure activities that constituted free time for Polish Jews in the 1920s and 1930s, Ula will examine a number of documents. She will pay particular attention to travel guides, manuals, maps, as well as press advertisements published in Jewish and non-Jewish press in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew. By doing so she hopes to reveal patterns and different agendas closely linked between leisure culture, modern Jewish identity and various strains of religiosity. The outcome of her study should render the complex processes of sociability, belonging and assimilation less abstract.

Ula Madej-Krupitski will be in residence at POLIN Museum and the Emmanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute from January until April 2017.

The GEOP Research Fellowship is offered by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in cooperation with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute within the framework of the Global Education Outreach Program. This program was made possible thanks to the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.