Born in 1980, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska studied cultural studies and sociology at the Universities in Lodz, Giessen and Mainz. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Lodz in 2008 and completed her habilitation at the University of Warsaw in 2016. Since 2008, she has been an assistant professor at the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the University of Lodz. She held a research fellowship at the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin from 2010 to 2015, after which she became a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw. From 2018 to 2020, she was also a visiting professor and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz. Her research fields are: Film and media history since 1945, visual history, collective and cultural memory, reception studies. Since 1 April 2024, Director of the German Historical Institute Warsaw.

Her research areas are: collective and cultural memories, remembrance of the Holocaust, film and media histories after 1945, visual history. She is currently leading the projects „Infrastructures of memory” and "Holocaust Mass Graves".

Monographs

Microhistories of Memory: Remediating the Holocaust by Bullets in Postwar West Germany. Translated by Alexander Simmeth. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2023.

Mikrogeschichten der Erinnerungskultur. „Am grünen Strand der Spree“ und die Remedialisierung des Holocaust. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110745528.

Bilder der Normalisierung. Gesundheit, Ernährung und Haushalt in der visuellen Kultur Deutschlands 1945–1948. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017. With Anna Labentz.

Ikony normalizacji. Kultury wizualne Niemiec 1945–1949. Warszawa: PWN, (2015) 2017.

Spotkania czasu z miejscem. Studia o pamięci i miastach. Warszawa: WUW, 2011.

Edited volumes

Bredekamp, Horst. Akt obrazu. Translated by Małgorzata Słabicka-Turpeinen. Afterword by Paweł Mościcki. Warszawa: WUW, 2024.

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska and Sonja Dolinšek, eds., Histories of Prostitution in Central, East Central and South Eastern Europe. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2024.

Historia wizualna. Obrazy w dyskusjach niemieckich historyków. Klio w Niemczech 25. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2020. 

Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska and Robert Traba, eds., Modi memorandi. Leksykon kultury pamięci. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2014.

Pamięć zbiorowa i kulturowa. Współczesne dyskusje niemieckie. Kraków: Universitas, 2009.

Journal articles

Memory Studies and History: trajectories of an academic relationship. In Rethinking History, 20.02.2026. With Joanna Wawrzyniak. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2026.2629216.

Jenseits von Auschwitz: Konzentrierte Erinnerung, verstreute Geschichte. In Zeitgeschichte-online, 24.01.2025. https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/themen/jenseits-von-auschwitz-konzentrierte-erinnerung-verstreute-geschichte.

Entrepreneurs of Memory: Selling History in the GDR Museum Shop in Berlin. In Memory Studies 17, no. 6 (2024). First published online, 05.02.2024. With Hanno Hochmuth and Sabine Stach. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231224697.

Im Namen des Volkes? Neue Sichtweise auf die polnische Geschichte. In Neue Politische Literatur 68 (2023): 111–124. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42520-023-00499-2.

Infrastructures of Mass Graves: Work-in-Progress in Tylawa. In Teksty Drugie. English Edition 1 (2023): 183–204.
https://tekstydrugie.pl/en/special-issues-in-english/.

Mnemonic Wars in Poland: An Introduction to New Research Directions. In Acta Poloniae Historica 128 (2023): 5–25. With Joanna Wawrzyniak and Zofia Wóycicka. https://doi.org/10.12775/APH.2023.128.01.

The Agency of Nationalistic Images: Visual Histories in Poland. In Visual History 7 (2022): 119–131. 
DOI: 10.19272/202112401007.

New Constellations of Mnemonic Wars: An Introduction. In Memory Studies 15, no. 6 (2022): 1275–1288. With Joanna Wawrzyniak and Zofia Wóycicka. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980221133733.

Wo bleibt die Filmzensur? Briefbeschwerden des Westberliner Kinopublikums in den 1950er Jahren. In Montage AV 30, no. 2 (2021): 15–32.

Abusing Public Visual History: The Current Right-Wing Press in Poland. In The Public Historian 42, no. 3 (2020): 61–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.3.61.

The Framework of Reception: Public Responses to Historical Fiction Films. In Res Historica 50 (2020). https://doi.org/10.17951/rh.2020.50.551-571.

Przeszłość i przyszłość badań pamięci. Czy potrzebujemy nowej dyscypliny? In Politeja 17, no. 2 (2020): 11–24. https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.17.2020.65.01.

Traveling Memories of the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union: Hans Scholz’s “Through the Night” and Its Remediations. In German Studies Review 43, no. 3 (2020): 499–515. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2020.0079.

Product Not Available in Pre-War Quantities – but Quality Remains the Same: Remarks on Advertisements as Historical Source. Translated by Patrick Trompiz. In Widok: Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej 25 (2019): 269–291. https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2019/25-present-history/notes-on-advertising.

Verordnete Geschichte. Nationalistische Narrative in Polen. In Osteuropa 68, nos. 2–5 (2018): 446–464. With Sabine Stach and Katrin Stoll.

Publiczne konstruowanie historii. Przeszłość w prawicowej ikonografii. In Teksty Drugie 6 (2016): 326–345. https://journals.openedition.org/td/1709.

Watching Films in the Ruins: Cinema-Going in Early Post-War Berlin. In Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 762–782. www.participations.org/Volume%2012/Issue%201/contents.htm.

Verpasste Debatte. „Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter“ in Deutschland und Polen. In Osteuropa 11–12 (2014): 115–132. With Carolin Piorun.

Chapters in edited volumes

“The Walls Are Where They Are”: An Infrastructural Approach to the Holocaust Galleries. In James Bulgin and Stephan Jaeger, eds., The New Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum London: Conception, Design, Interpretation, 395–414. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2025.

The German “Floating Gap”: Post-Unification Memory in Literary Fiction. With Joanna Jabłkowska. In Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak, eds., Remembering the Neoliberal Turn. Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe after 1989, 264–282. London: Routledge, 2024.

The West German View of the Holocaust by Bullets: The Case of “Am grünen Strand der Spree” 1955–1960. In Anna Koch and Stephan Stach, eds., Holocaust Memory and the Cold War: Remembering across the Iron Curtain, 255–274. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2024.

Introduction: Approaches to the Histories of Prostitution in Central, East Central, and South Eastern Europe. In Sonja Dolinšek and Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, eds., Histories of Prostitution in Central, East Central and South Eastern Europe, IX–XXIX. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh, 2023. https://brill.com/display/book/9783657790470/front-8.xml.

The Montage of the National Past: Polish Right-Wing Illustrated Press and the Abuse of History. In Naviseh Mousavi and Beate Schirrmacher, eds., Truth Claims across Media, 49–69. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42064-1_3.

„Ich war gezwungen zuzusehen“. Zu Holocausttätern, die sich als Zeugen inszenierten. In Zeynep Tuna, Mona Wischoff, and Isabelle Zinsmeyer, eds., Bezeugen: Mediale, forensische und kulturelle Praktiken der Zeugenschaft, 225–240. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2022.

Zwischen den Schichten lesen. »Am grünen Strand der Spree« und die Authentisierung der Holocaustdarstellung. In Christoph Classen, Achim Saupe, and Hans-Ulrich Wagner, eds., Echt inszeniert. Historische Authentizität und Medien in der Moderne, 127–162. Potsdam: zdbooks, 2021. https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-2446.

Holocaustdarstellungen im polnischen Film. Drei Beispielstudien. In Konstantin Behrens, Ira Diedrich, Christian Ernst, Christoph Kapp, Jacob Panzner, Ulrike Schneider, and Frank Voigt, eds., Nachkriegsliteratur als öffentliche Erinnerung, 246–260. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783050093932-012.

Breslau: Die doppelte Geschichte einer Stadt. With Juliane Haubold-Stolle. In Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba, eds., Deutsch-polnische Erinnerungsorte, vol. 1: Geteilt / Gemeinsam, 235–256. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015.

Starke Frauen und schwache Männer oder die Paradoxien der Rollenverteilung. In Konrad Klejsa, Schamma Schahadat, and Margarethe Wach, eds., Der polnische Film. Von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 185–203. Marburg: Schüren, 2013.

Käfer und Maluch und Trabi: Die motorisierte Sehnsucht: Freiheit, Konsum und „die guten alten Zeiten“. With Magdalena Pyzio. In Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba, eds., Deutsch-polnische Erinnerungsorte, vol. 3: Parallelen, 430–451. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012.

Member of the international advisory board of Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 

Member of the Academic Board of the Viadrina Center for Polish and Ukrainian Studies, European University Frankfurt (Oder)

Member of the Academic Board of the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam

Member of the Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association (2021-2024)

Ambassador Scientist of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2020-2023)

Chair of the Team for International Relations at the Committee of Culture Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2020-2023)

Multiple member of expert commissions at the National Science Center

Jablonowski-Award for Activities in the field of Polish-German cultural and academic relations 2019

Peer reviews among others for: „East European Politics and Societies”, „Memory Studies”, „The Polish Review”, Routledge.