Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin

March – August 2016

Wearing Patriotism: Polish and Jewish Patriotic Attire in Partitioned Poland (1861-1918)

The current research project of Anna Novikov examines the crucial role of patriotic clothing and appearance in the creation of a visual sense of belonging of groups. It concentrates on two populations: Polish and Jewish in Warsaw and Lemberg from 1861 until 1918, between the January Uprising until the end of World War I in an area divided between two empires in which these group patriotic self-images were formed and crystallized. It studies how these images influenced or were used in the process of creation of a belonging within the heterogenic Polish and Jewish populations on the one hand. The project traces it through an analysis of a visual link, which was created in the Polish and Jewish collective memory between one of the most ideologically important periods in the Polish history: the so called People's Morning in 1861-1864 (and moreover, the January Uprising of 1864) and the visual group self-perception during the World War I.

Finally, the project will show how transnational patriotic European (especially German, French and British) cultural local and ethnic images, notions and ideals influences and then were both preserved and transformed in different social levels of these two groups, as seen by the clothing adopted, mediating between the group imagination and its inculcation into the daily life.

Anna Novikov received her PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2013. Her research focuses on cultural and visual transnational modern East-Central European and Jewish history. During her PhD she was a Junior Visiting and Research Fellow at Oxford University and at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig and has been awarded, among other things, the Rothenstreich Fellowship for Outstanding Doctoral Students (2010-2012), The Cantemir Fellowship in Oxford (2011), the Naomi and Bernard Frieden Award for the Study of European Jewish History (2012) and the Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European Studies Fellowship (2013).