University of Michigan

Faculty Member, Sociology

Associate Professor

About

My research focuses on the linkages between religion, politics, and collective memory at moments of significant political transformation. I combine historical and ethnographic methods, and consider evidence from material and visual culture.

My first book, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (U. of Chicago Press, 2006), studied the historical constitution of the relationship between Polish national identity and Catholicism, and its reconfiguration after the fall of communism. Through a multi-layered analysis of the “War of the Crosses” at Auschwitz in the summer and fall of 1998—during which ultra-nationalist Polish Catholics erected hundreds of crosses just outside the former death camp—I examine why and how religion and its symbols are mobilized in nationalist discourse and practice, and identify the socio-historical processes behind the relative fusion or fission of religious and national categories. To make sense of ethnoreligious nationalism, I argue, we must move beyond the study of the nation-religion dyad and instead focus on the triadic nexus between state (re)formation, the (re)construction of national identity and the (re)definition of religion’s role in society.

The Crosses of Auschwitz received the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award in the Sociology of Religion; the Orbis Book Prize, awarded annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies to "the best book in any discipline, on any aspect of Polish affairs"; and the Polish Studies Association’s Kulczycki Best Book Award.

I am now extending my research agenda in two directions:

I continue investigating the triadic relationship between religion, nationalism and state (re)formation by turning to the case of Quebec.  I’m currently at work on a book-length historical ethnography of the genesis and transformation of French Canadian/Québécois national identity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, through the examination of the “career” of St. John the Baptist, the national patron-saint.  I trace and analyze the ritual use of the symbolic figure in religious processions, popular parades and political demonstrations, paying specific attention to the 1960’s Quiet Revolution but extending my analysis to recent debates on secularism and immigration.

I also pursue my work on national mythology and symbolic boundary-making in Poland, and am now embarking on a project on the Jewish community’s revival in Poland, as well as non-Jewish Poles’ interest in Jewish culture and Polish-Jewish relations.

My most recent article, “History and The National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology,” published in March 2011 in Qualitative Sociology, received the Clifford Geertz Award for Best Article from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Culture Section.

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