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Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino
Visiting Fellowship 2026/27

Natalia Jarska

associate professor, The Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland 

Natalia Jarska is a historian and Associate Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she heads the “Transnational Initiative” research group. She currently co-leads (with Annina Gagyiova) the WEAVE project “FemEx: Women experts and feminist knowledge production in post-war East Central Europe, 1945–1989,” which investigates the trajectories and contributions of female experts in medicine and the social sciences in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Her research interests center on women’s labor under state socialism, reproductive health, sexuality and gender, women’s social movements, and the history of expertise and knowledge circulation in the human sciences.

Between 2020 and 2021, she was a visiting researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, supported by a Bekker Fellowship from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). From 2021 to 2024, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the “Expert Turn” project (PI: Kateřina Lišková). She is the author of the monograph Women of Marble: Women Workers in Poland 1945–1960 (written in Polish; Warsaw, 2015). Her articles have appeared in leading academic journals, including Contemporary European History, Medical History, Women’s History Review, European History Quarterly, The Historical Journal, and Slavic Review. Additionally, she co-coordinates the Feminist Labour History Working Group of the European Labour History Network (ELHN).

Statement of interest:

I am interested in strengthening and expanding exchange and collaboration with scholars affiliated with the INZ, building on shared research interests. The Institute hosts various research projects which are closely related to my expertise, such as women’s political thought or socialist sociology. Within my current project, I am exploring the history of feminist knowledge, focusing on women’s expert trajectories. My project has a strong transnational approach and a biographical focus. I am highly interested in intellectual exchange and in searching for connections and potential shared research topics for future collaborative Polish-Slovenian projects after FemEx ends (in 2028).

Selected Publications:

  • Jarska, N. (2026) „Expertise and Women Workers in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s: from Occupational Health to the Sociology of Medicine“, Moving the Social, 2026, 78, https://doi.org/10.7788/mots.2026.78.79
  • Jarska N. (2025) “The Women’s Movement in Poland and International Women’s Year. International Encounters”, Aspasia (19): 16–39. https://doi.org/10.3167/asp.2025.190103
  • Jarska, N. (2024) “Trade Union Activists, Expertise and Gender Inequalities in the Workplace in Post-1956 Poland: A Struggle to Reveal Unequal Pay”, Through the Prism of Gender and Work. Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Selin Çağatay, Alexandra Ghit, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, and Susan Zimmermann, Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004682481_013
  • Lišková, K., Jarska, N., Gagyiova, A., Aguilar López-Barajas, J. L., & Rábová, Š. C. (2023). Saving newborns, defining livebirth: The struggle to reduce infant mortality in East-Central Europe in comparative and transnational perspectives, 1945–1965. History of Science, 00732753231187486. https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231187486
  • Jarska, N., & Ignaciuk, A. (2021). Marriage, Gender and Demographic Change: Managing Fertility in State-Socialist Poland. Slavic Review, 81(1), 142-162. doi:10.1017/slr.2022.85

 

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