Agata Jankowska

Agata Jankowska is a doctoral student at the Institute of History, University of Szczecin, and a graduate in history from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Her MA dissertation titled “The Muselmann condition. Giorgio Agamben’s ideas versus the sources and witness account literature” was granted a honorable mention at the Majer Bałaban competition organized by the Jewish Historical Institute.

During her GEOP Fellowship at POLIN Museum and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Agata Jankowska will pursue her research on forensic aesthetics in the study of Holocaust photography. She is interested in the relation between photographs as a proof of crime and photographs as a testament/witness to the past.

She works with archival photos taken at former death and concentration camps, seeking less known images from the Holocaust dominated by non-human or post-human witnesses: objects, landscape, bones and ashes. She combines criticism of historical sources with a theory of history and other branches of humanities, i.a. studies on visuality, “forensic turn”, focus on non-human others.

The GEOP Research Fellowship is offered by POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in cooperation with the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute within the framework of the Global Education Outreach Program. This program was made possible thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.