Social psychology · Université libre de Bruxelles

How societies remember violence, and what those memories do to the people who inherit them.

I am a postdoctoral researcher in social psychology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, working with Professor Laurent Licata on how museum visitors respond to contested colonial objects, and on what shifts their views on restitution. The work is part of the Horizon Europe project CONCILIARE and is based at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren.

I am also a member of the UNESCO Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies on Antisemitism and Other Forms of Group Hatred at the University of Warsaw, where I completed my PhD.

I study how the memory of historical violence, particularly the Holocaust and European colonialism, continues to shape attitudes, identities, and political behaviour today. What interests me most are the mechanisms that connect a person’s sense of their own moral standing to the way they judge what their nation did: how defending the group’s past can become a way of defending oneself.

At the moment I am finishing a series of studies asking whether antisemitism precedes Holocaust distortion rather than following from it, and moving the museum research from how visitors react to contested heritage toward what actually changes their minds.

Current Position

Postdoctoral researcher
Université libre de Bruxelles

Affiliations

UNESCO Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies on Antisemitism and Other Forms of Group Hatred
University of Warsaw

PhD

University of Warsaw, 2023

Languages

Polish, English, French

Contact

Email maria.babinska@ulb.be

ORCID 0000-0002-2129-9449

Scholar Google Scholar profile

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/maria-babinska

I am happy to hear from people interested in collaboration, and from students thinking about research in this area.