Contact information
I'm on leave from CEU working on my next project.
Contact me at: alexandra.kowalski AT sciencespo.fr
Research interests: I'm a comparative-historical sociologist and a social theorist with interest in art, knowledge, and culture production, and a co-founder of the Cultural Heritage Program at CEU. My empirical research focuses on cultural politics, especially on heritage and collective memory. I'm also interested in the history and philosophy of the social sciences. I received a PhD from New York University, and hold MAs in Philosophy/Epistemology of the Social Sciences (Paris-Sorbonne) as well as Sociology (NYU). Recent publications deal with Hungary's Holocaust memory, the social-political history of "heritage," UNESCO's World Heritage list, and the decentralization of policies of patrimoine in France. Past work includes research on sexuality and everyday culture in Germany and France, the Arts and Crafts movement, and media and nationalism in the French heritage movement. I've just completed a French book manuscript, entitled Un Projet Francais. L'Inventaire Général et la Naissance du Patrimoine. My work has received support from the Florence Gould Foundation and the Center for European Studies, Princeton's Fung Fellowship at the Institute for International and Regional Studies, as well as through scholarships from McGill University's Department of Media and Art History, NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, and Sciences Po Paris.
I'm currently on leave from CEU, at Sciences Po Paris' Media Lab working on my next big project -- an intellectual history of Actor Network Theory. Other current projects include further publications about the memory of the Holocaust in Europe/Hungary; on the history of "cultural development" in Hungary, France, and in international organizations between the 1960s and the present; and on the cross-overs between "critical sociology" and sociological pragmatism.
Courses at CEU incl.: Politics of Memory and Heritage; Culture and the State; Art and Society; and Contemporary Social Theory. Past courses: Classical Sociological Theory; Sociology of the State; State, knowledge, experts.
PhD supervisees incl.: Aleksandra Lis (Impact of EU Structural Policy on Civil Society in Poland), Mariya Ivancheva (From Revolution to Reconciliation: Venezuelan intellectuals on the Road to Power), Jana Tsoneva (The Making of the Bugarian Middle Class: citizens against the people in the 2013 Protests), Marton Szarvas (Peace Time for the "Soldiers of Culture": Civis Cultivation in Hungary's Houses of Culture since 1990), Kristof Nagy (Art Policy and Late Capitalism : Hungary's Academy of Arts and The New Culture Wars), Leiyi Lin (Social Media, Humor, and Creativity in Contemporary China), Shreya Ramnath (Carnatic Music in the World After. How Traditions Get Reconfigured through Catastrophic Times)
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