Research

My research asks how collective memories of violence are transmitted, contested, and put to political use, and what they do to the people who carry them.

Themes

Antisemitism and Holocaust distortion

Prejudice toward Jews is usually treated as a consequence of how societies remember the Holocaust. My work argues the reverse: antisemitic attitudes come first and shape the distortions, so that ingroup-serving accounts of the occupation are better read as an expression of prejudice than as its source. Related work asks how exclusive and inclusive forms of victim consciousness structure these distortions across Central and Eastern Europe, and how ordinary Poles picture the bystanders in their own national story.

Colonial memory and the museum visitor

Work with the Royal Museum for Central Africa examines how Belgian audiences encounter and interpret contested colonial heritage, and how the framing of that heritage shapes moral emotions and support for reparative policy. The current phase of this work moves from description to change: not how visitors react to these objects, but what, if anything, shifts their views on restitution.

Moral self and historical memory

How people’s sense of their own moral standing shapes the way they evaluate their group’s past. Across Polish samples, a person’s moral self-concept predicts how favourably they judge historically contested episodes, which suggests that defending the group’s history is partly an act of defending oneself.

Historical analogies and helping behaviour

Whether invoking a group’s own history of suffering increases or dampens sympathy for others in need. Both answers have support in the literature, and a single measurement cannot tell them apart, so this work tracks the relationship longitudinally, following how appeals to past victimhood and sympathy for present-day outgroups move together over time.

Current projects

CONCILIARE. Horizon Europe project on heritage, memory, and reconciliation, in collaboration with the Royal Museum for Central Africa. I run the visitor studies on responses to contested colonial objects and on how curatorial framing shifts attitudes toward restitution.

UNESCO Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies on Antisemitism and Other Forms of Group Hatred. Team member at the Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw. My contribution concerns the psychological determinants of Holocaust distortion and its links to contemporary antisemitism.