Barbara Tornquist-Plewa

  • Professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and Director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Sweden and Anna Lindh Fellow at The Europe Center

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Biography

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.  Her research interest include nationalism, collective memory, myth and symbols in Central and Eastern Europe (with focus on Poland, Belarus and Ukraine) as well cultural integration in Europe.  She has been involved in and coordinated a number of research projects on these issues.  Currently she leads a large international research network called “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” financed by the EU (COST-programme) and the research project “Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern European Cities”.  She is also Lund University’s coordinator for International Research Training Group (Greifswald – Lund – Tartu) “Baltic Borderlands”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Professor Törnquist-Plewa's publications include monographs The Wheel of Polish Fortune : Myths in Polish Collective Consciousness during the First Years of Solidarity, (1992) and Belarus: Language and Nationalism in Borderlands (in Swedish), (2001) and a number of articles and book chapters, the most recent one "Coming to Terms with anti-Semitism in Poland", European Cultural Memory Post-89, 2013 inv.30 in European Studies Series, Amsterdam: Rodopi. She contributed to and edited 14 collections of essays, the recent entitled Cultural Transformations after Communism. Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Painful Pasts and Useful Memories. Remembering and Forgetting in Europe, (2012).