Description:

In her presentation Professor Stauter-Halsted will examine the ways mobility became criminalized after the First World War in the newly established Polish state and how migrants turned into ethnic “others.” The paper considers how the decisions of individual bureaucrats and the informal practices of civilians, especially with regard to the mobile population of returnees and refugees, helped shape definitions of citizenship and national identity in non-violent ways within the new Polish Republic.

Keely Stauter-Halsted is a Professor of History and Hejna Family Chair in the History of Poland at the University of Illinois in Chicago.  Her most recent book, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (2015), was the recipient of the American Historical Association Joan Kelly Prize for gender history, the Oskar Halicki Prize from Polish Institute of Art and Sciences in America, and the Association for Women in Slavic History Heldt Prize.

This event is part of the Center for International and Area Studies Global Lunchbox Series and is co-sponsored by Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies Research Program, the History Department and the Colloquium on Refugees, Migrants and Statelessness