Halicka, Beata

Beata Halicka is Professor of Contemporary History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Between 2006 and 2014, she lectured at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). She has held research fellowships at the universities of Calgary (2014) and El Paso (2016), as well as at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2017). She was also a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow in the United States (2022–23) and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2024).

She is the author of eight books and numerous articles published in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Her book The Polish Wild West: Forced Migration and Cultural Appropriation in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1945–1948 received the Identities Prize in 2016 for the best historical book published in Poland. Her biography Borderlands Biography: Z. Anthony Kruszewski in Wartime Europe and Postwar America has appeared in Polish (2019), English (2021), German (2024), and Spanish (2026). It reflects her internationally recognized expertise in the transnational histories of Polish migrants.

Her current research combines biographical approaches with the study of wider social and cultural contexts, with particular attention to women’s life trajectories, migration, and intellectual history. Her latest book, Danuta Mostwin: At Home in Exile Between Europe and America (1921–2010), explores the life and work of a Polish-American writer and scholar, offering new perspectives on post-war migration, women’s experiences of displacement, and transnational intellectual and cultural history.

Since 2019, she has been a member of the Polish American Historical Association and of the Canada-Europe Network research group. Professor Halicka leads the Polish research team in the Mnemonic Democracy: Collective Memory, Civic Education, and Democratic Engagement project and has extensive experience coordinating international research on memory politics, European integration, and borderland societies.

Fields of Expertise: – memory culture and politics, German-Polish relations, migration, identity formation in the border regions, the historical legacies of fascism, communism, and the Holocaust in contemporary Europe, the Polish diaspora and women’s history, gender inequality, history of injustice

Research interests: nationalism, forced migrations, constructions of identities in border regions, collective memory, German-Polish relations, Polish diaspora in the world.