Participant Info

First Name
Katarzyna
Last Name
Nowak
Country
Austria
State
Affiliation
University of Vienna
Website URL
https://www.katarzyna-nowak.com/
Keywords
Cold War, Vatican, refugees, World War II, Vatican archives, migration, UNRRA, postwar reconstruction, population displacement, intellectual history of communism and anti-communism, Pius XII, Rome
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Dr Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specialising in cultural and social history of the early Cold War and the author of Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria.

She is currently working on her book project Knocking on the Vatican’s Gates. Refugees, the Holy See, and the Spectre of Communism, 1945-1958 , based on the recently opened collection of the Vatican archives, as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna.

Recent Publications

Katarzyna Nowak, Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023.

Katarzyna Nowak, ‘Recivilizing Refugees: Material Culture and Displacement in Transitions from War to Peace in Displaced Persons Camps in Post-Second World War Europe’, S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 10 (2023) 1, 4–22. Download PDF.

Peter Gatrell, Anindita Ghoshal, Katarzyna Nowak, and Alex Dowdall, ‘Reckoning with Refugeedom: Refugee Voices in Modern History’, Social History, 46:1, 70-95, 2021.

Lauren Banko, Katarzyna Nowak, and Peter Gatrell, ‘What is Refugee History, Now?’, Journal of Global History, 1–19, 2021.

Katarzyna Nowak, “The Vatican’s Aid to Displaced Persons and Refugees in the Aftermath of World War II”, in Simon Unger-Avi (ed.), Katholizismus am Eisernen Vorhang. Der Vatikan, Westdeutschland und der Kalte Krieg, 1945-1965 (forthcoming).

Katarzyna Nowak, “‘Low in Health and Spirits.’ Health and Hygiene Campaign in UNRRA Camps in Germany and Austria as a Form of Rehabilitation”, in S. K. Knapton & K. Rossy (eds.), Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World? Humanitarian Intervention and the UNRRA (Histories of Internationalism series with Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

Katarzyna Nowak, “Archives and Historical Perspectives in Researching Humanitarianism”, Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality, in Silke Roth, Tobias Denskus, and Bandama Purkayastha (eds.), Edward Elgar, 2024.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Eastern and Central Europe, Italy, Soviet Union
Expertise by Geography
Eastern Europe, Germany
Expertise by Chronology
20th century
Expertise by Topic
Gender, Holocaust & Nazi Persecution, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Migration & Immigration, Religion, World War II