Anna Niedzwiedz, Kosciuszko Foundation Visiting Professor at University at Buffalo (The State University of New York), Polish Studies Program, will talk on the symbolic meanings connected to the popular image of Our Lady in Polish culture. She will discuss the complexity of depicting the Mother of God through various historical and ethnographical examples. The talk will provide a special focus on the Communist period when Our Lady served as a powerful anti-Communist figure in many political texts.
Niedzwiedz, who is affiliated with the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, earned a doctoral degree in 2003 in cultural anthropology from Jagiellonian University. In 2005, she published Obraz i postac: Znaczenia wizerunku Matki Boskiej Czestochowskiej (Image and Person: Meanings of the Picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa) after conducting field work on Polish religiosity. She has taught cultural anthropology at Jagiellonian and at the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Poland. Her presentation, titled "Images of the Mother of God in Polish Religiosity," is sponsored by the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, the Department of Religion and Classics, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester.
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