Welcome to the Polish Studies Program!
The Polish Studies Program at the University at Buffalo has entered a period of programmatic development. We aspire to engage students, scholars and the community whose knowledge and interests center on the Polish experience. The Program’s mission involves a broad approach to the discipline that situates Polishness in its historical contexts of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and diaspora. We seek to provide a contemporary international perspective that reflects the nation’s new position as a member of the European Union, incorporating, at the same time, the Polish experience outside of Poland as reflected in the Polish community in Buffalo.
News and Events
Agnieszka Pasieka, “How pluralism becomes hierarchical? The challenges of religions and diversity in Catholic Poland”
Thursday, April 10, 2014, 4:00
640 Clemens Hall
Doctor Pasieka is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences and in the academic year of 2013-2014 she serves as a Visiting Fellow in the Slavic Languages and Literature Department at Yale University. She will discuss the dynamics of religious diversity in Poland and how people engage with and produce pluralism locally. She makes the inhabitants of a peripheral, multireligious rural area the main protagonists and demonstrates that such a marginal context best elucidates the actual religious landscape and religious-national politics in contemporary Poland. At the same time, she argues that we can better understand the nature of pluralism if we examine how it is lived and experienced within a society that is largely homogenous. In her research, she exposes the double-edged nature of pluralism and sheds light on the challenges of religious pluralism in Poland and beyond.