Transregional Center for Democratic Studies

02/17/2026

CFP 2026: Routes and Roots: Migration, Memory, Transnationality

Call for papers (March 15, 2026, deadline)

Date: April 16-17, 2026

The conference “Routes and Roots: Migration, Memory, Transnationality” invites scholars to explore the dynamic interplay between movement and remembrance. Its central theme asks how migration, displacement, and transnational mobility reshape both the routes through which memories travel and the roots that anchor identities across shifting geographies (Gilroy 1993); Alongside migrant and diasporic perspectives, the conference foregrounds indigenous and host communities’ approaches to memory, land, and mobility seeking to understand how their claims to place and knowledge intersect with, contest, and reframe histories of transoceanic migration and displacement (DeLoughrey 2007).

Submission Guidelines

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from memory studies, history, sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, and related fields.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio of no more than 100 words by March 15, 2026, to the organizers at [email protected].

More info: https://blogs.newschool.edu/memorystudiestns/2026/02/17/cfp-2026-routes-and-roots-migration-memory-transnationality/

The Memory Studies Network (MSN) of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at New School for Social Research

11/06/2025

Join us on Thursday, November 13, at 6:00PM for a talk with Natalija Majsova on 'Structures of feeling and post-Yugoslav memory work in popular culture'

Open to the Public - RSVP required: https://event.newschool.edu/postyugoslavmemorywork

Location: Sociology Lounge, 9th Floor
New School for Social Research
6 East 16th Street
New York, NY

Engaging with the popular-cultural imaginary and mediatized afterlives of the former socialist Yugoslavia, this talk reflects on the relationship between memory work and contemporary popular culture. While memory work entails different practices that “stage memory through words, spoken and written, in images of many kinds, and in sounds”, “translat/ing/ the psychical activity of warding off loss into the domain of the social” (Kuhn 2000), popular culture is a transmedial site of multimodal collective memory production, negotiation, contestation, and consolidation. However, popular-cultural tropes remain under-researched as tools for memory work, limiting our understanding of how popular culture contributes to shifts in collective memory on various scales, and how aesthetic, affective, and narrative repertoires coalesce in popular-cultural accounts of the past to produce mnemonic impact. Focussing on the post-Yugoslav space and drawing on examples from films, music, and videogames that engage with the recent past in an interrogative and open-ended way, the talk proposes to re-evaluate the significance of memory work to memory popularization, and thus to the memory politics of popular culture. Additionally, a comparison of this popular-cultural imaginary of the “post-Yugoslav condition” with insights from a large corpus of oral history interviews is presented to highlight in what ways popular culture not only archives stories about the past, but also the structures of feeling that mark our relationship to this past, presenting an interactive barometer of collective memory.

Presented by the Memory Studies Network (MSN) of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research.

Photo: Goriška Brda, Slovenia, 2021, taken by Natalija Majsova.

09/22/2025

Join us on October 20th for a BOOK EVENT: Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s IN THE GARDEN OF MEMORY: A Family Memoir — Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator) in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos

Monday, October 20, 2025, 6:00PM to 8:00PM (EEST)
The Bob and Sheila Hoerle Lecture Hall
University Center, UL105; 63 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY

FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC with RSVP: LINK in BIO

Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland’s most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family—Polish Jews who were members of one of the country’s most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture—as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century. The book won the 2002 Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, and now is published in the United States for the first time.

Coming to the New School on October 20th to discuss this remarkable book are Antonia Lloyd-Jones, its translator, and Peter L.W. Osnos, the publisher responsible for bringing it to America. A day earlier, there will be a chance to attend the discussion about the book at Politics and Prose in Washington D.C.

Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) and the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Photos:
Book cover
Joanna-Olczak-Ronikier, photo by @ Daniel Malak, Gazeta Wyborcza
Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator)
Peter L. W. Osnos

06/13/2025

ALUMNI NEWS!!!

TCDS & New School for Social Research Alumna, Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, defends her habilitation at the Polish Academy of Sciences!

Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer earned her Ph.D. in 2014 under the supervision of Professor Elżbieta Matynia. While at NSSR she worked closely with the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. She has recently completed her habilitation (equivalent to tenure) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences.

Read more here: https://blogs.newschool.edu/tcds/2025/06/12/tcds-nssr-alumna-helena-chmielewska-szlajfer-defends-her-habilitation-at-the-polish-academy-of-sciences/

06/12/2025

Masha Gessen to Receive the 2025 Courage in Public Scholarship Award!

The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), in collaboration with the NSSR-Europe Collective, is deeply honored to announce that Masha Gessen has been named the recipient of the seventh annual Courage in Public Scholarship Award.

Bestowed each year, the award honors distinguished scholars, writers, and public intellectuals whose work reflects a rare combination of moral clarity, intellectual rigor, and unwavering public engagement with the most urgent and difficult issues of our time.

Masha Gessen’s fearless and profoundly humane voice has been indispensable in exposing the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, the precariousness of democratic institutions, and the human consequences suffered by those denied agency and visibility. Their work exemplifies the very essence of the courage this award seeks to recognize—bold, principled, and unrelenting in its pursuit of truth and justice, even in moments of deep uncertainty.

Read the full announcement here: https://blogs.newschool.edu/tcds/2025/05/27/masha-gessen-to-receive-the-2025-courage-in-public-scholarship-award/

Photo credit: Damian Winter

03/22/2025

03/18/2025

Deadline EXTENDED to March 30th!

Apply for the 2025 Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institute, WROCŁAW, Poland, July 4-19, 2025.

This year's theme: Reclaiming Democratic Futures

Choose two out of the four core seminars:

Liberal Crises: History, Theory, Lessons - Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research;

Imagining Other Futures: Gender, Class and Race in Democratic Projects - Shireen Hassim, Canada150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University, Ottawa, and the 2025 Hans Speier Visiting professor at The New School for Social Research;

Democracy’s Endgame? Making Sense of the Political Today - Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research;

America is Hard to Find: Crisis, Resistance, and Renewal - Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College

More info here: https://blogs.newschool.edu/tcds/dd-institutes/2025-democracy-diversity-summer-institute/

New School for Social Research

03/14/2025

Join us on March 26th for our 'Book Launch: Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity' The New School for Social Research

In-person talk and book launch by Karen Underhill, University of Illinois Chicago, in conversation with Irena Grudzińska-Gross, scholar and writer

Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 6:00PM

More info and to RSVP please see: https://event.newschool.edu/brunoschulz

Presented by TCDS, Polish Cultural Institute New York and Piasa NY

03/13/2025

Apply for our 2025 Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institute, to take place in WROCŁAW, Poland, July 4-19, 2025.

The forward-looking theme of this year’s Institute is RECLAIMING DEMOCRATIC FUTURES.

Application DEADLINE is March 20th!

More info here: https://blogs.newschool.edu/tcds/dd-institutes/2025-democracy-diversity-summer-institute/

Courses Offered this summer:

* Imagining Other Futures: Gender, Class and Race in Democratic Projects
Shireen Hassim, Canada150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University, Ottawa, and the 2025 Hans Speier Visiting professor at The New School for Social Research

* Liberal Crises: History, Theory, Lessons
Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research

* Democracy’s Endgame? Making Sense of the Political Today
Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research

* America is Hard to Find: Crisis, Resistance, and Renewal
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College

The New School for Social Research

12/24/2024