Aleksandra Kremer

I am Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature at Harvard University. My main area of research and teaching is Polish literature and culture, with special interests in modern poetry, poetics, cultural history, sound studies, Holocaust memory, migration, and translation.

I received a PhD in literary studies from the University of Warsaw, an MPhil in European literature from the University of Cambridge, and two BA/MA degrees, in Polish and English, from the University of Warsaw. Before joining Harvard in 2016, I taught at the University of Warsaw and was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan.

My first book, Przypadki poezji konkretnej: Studia pięciu książek (The Twists and Turns of Concrete Poetry: Case Studies of Five Books), was published with IBL PAN in 2015. It studies experimental poetry from the 1950s and '60s and explores the role of book series and book design in the development of concrete poetry movement in German-speaking countries – in comparison with Poland and the Anglophone world. It focuses on poetry books by Eugen Gomringer, Heinz Gappmayr, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Stanisław Dróżdż, and Witold Wirpsza.

My second book, The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II, was published with Harvard University Press in 2021. It is the first book on Polish poetry to treat vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, CDs, and radio broadcasts as primary sources, and to combine these audio sources with memoirs, journals, and letters in order to reconstruct numerous private and public readings and recordings. The monograph documents that key Polish poets, such as Czesław Miłosz, Aleksander Wat, Miron Białoszewski, and Tadeusz Różewicz, tested the possibilities of their physical voices, often by means of tape recording, and introduced new poetic practices and genres to Polish culture. Their audio recordings reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self that emerged in Poland after World War II. My monograph was awarded the ASEEES Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies and received Honorable Mention for the PIASA Waclaw Lednicki Award in the Humanities. Links to several recordings of the poets studied in the book can be found under this tab. I have also published a related article (2024) on postmemory in poetry performances by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, a major contemporary Polish poet whose texts concern his family’s Polish-Ukrainian background.

I am currently working on my third book project, tentatively titled Between the Lines: Early Responses to World War II and the Holocaust in Polish Poetry. It revisits the question of poetry’s response to the Holocaust and reexamines the blurred relation between “war literature” and “Holocaust literature” written in Polish in the 1940s. In connection with this project, I have written about Holocaust epigrams by a little-known poet Izabella Czermak and her prewar friendship with Bruno Schulz (2023); a 1948 cycle of poems by Aleksander Wat and his dialogue with Paul Éluard (2025); and the first anthologies of Polish-language Holocaust poetry, from 1944 and 1947, and their reception in Polish and Polish-Jewish publications of the 1940s (forthcoming). 

I have edited and co-edited three special issues of Polish academic journals, most recently: "Pisanie humanistyki / Writing the Humanities" in Konteksty Kultury, no. 1 (2024).

My studies and research were supported, among others, by the Leon and Edith Milman Fellowship from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the John F. Cogan Junior Faculty Leave Program from Harvard’s Davis Center; O'Neill Faculty Research Grant from Harvard’s Davis Center; Preludium and Sonata grants from the National Science Centre in Poland; scholarships from the University of Cambridge; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; Corbridge Trust; and the University of Warsaw.

I teach survey courses in Polish literature and culture, graduate seminars on poetry and theory and on Polish thought, introductions to Slavic studies (sophomore tutorials), first-year seminars, as well as conference courses on twentieth-century Polish culture, poetry, and Holocaust memory.

Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz