Meghann Pytka, PhD
Meghann Pytka, PhD, is an instructional specialist in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a lecturer in the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University.
Previously, she was the assistant direct for the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She is currently working on her project,"“Active National Forgetting and Sexual Violence in Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine, 1939-1947."
Pytka was a doctoral student at Northwestern University in the Department of History. Her dissertation, entitled "Policing the Binary—Patrolling the Nation: Race and Gender in Polish Integral Nationalism, from Partitions to Parliament (1883 – 1926)," dealt with the intersection of gender and ethnicity within the ideology of the National Camp. At Northwestern, she also earned a graduate certificate in Gender Studies.
Her research, writing, and professional development has been generously supported by many foundations, including: the Harvard Ukrainian Institute, Yad Vashem, EHRI, Kolegium Europy Wschodniej, the USHMM, the Crown Center for Jewish Studies, IREX (IARO), the Fulbright Commission, the ACLS, FLAS, and the Kościuszko Foundation.
Pytka recently presented at the Seminarium hisorii gender at Warsaw University. Her talk focused on the intersectional implications for race and gender embedded within the Konstytucja marcowa.
scholar of modern Central and Eastern European, her academic interests include genocide and ethnic cleansing, imperialism, anti-colonial resistance, gender violence, nationalism, feminism, and radical rightwing movements.
During her five-month GEOP Research Fellowship, Pytka will continue to work on her project focusing on sexual violence in Eastern Galicja during World War II and its aftermath.
Pytka will be in residence in Warsaw, at the POLIN Museum and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, intermittently throughout 2022 and 2023.
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 Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.