Photo of Dobrowolska, Joanna

Joanna Dobrowolska

Graduate Student

History

Contact

Building & Room:

UH 1027

Address:

601 S Morgan

About

Program: PhD

Start Year: 2018

Advisor: Keely Stauter-Halsted

Courses Taught:

  • Fall 2019 Teaching Assistant, Western Civilization Since 1648 (Taught by Michał Wilczewski)
  • Spring 2019 Teaching Assistant, History of Poland (Taught by Keely Stauter-Halsted)
  • Fall 2018 Teaching Assistant, Western Civilization Part I (Origins of the West) (Taught by John Abbott)

 

Joanna Dobrowolska is a Ph.D. student interested in ethnic conflict and genocide. She is particularly fascinated by moments when relations between neighboring communities dissolve into violence. Having spent her childhood in Poland, Joanna is fluent in Polish and therefore decided to focus on ethnic clashes in Poland during the interwar period and World War II. Her time studying Ukrainian and doing archival research in Lviv, Ukraine has helped shape her research interests. In her MA thesis, she explored the impact of antisemitic rhetoric and politics on relations between Poles and Jews in the Masovian Voivodeship in interwar Poland.

 

Education

BA, History at Utah State University, December 2015

MA, History at Utah State University, May 2018

Research Currently in Progress

Joanna’s current research examines social relations in the diverse communities of Volhynia (what is now northwestern Ukraine) in the 1930s and 1940s; her project traces the ways in which relations within these communities changed with the outbreak of the Second World War. This project also searches out for the variety of local forces that unite communities and the forces that rend them apart, particularly under the contexts of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and neighbor-on-neighbor violence.