Dr Kasia Jezowska

I am a historian of modern Eastern Europe. My research focuses on the material cultures of state socialism, considering their industrial, political, and social dimensions during the Cold War. More broadly, I am interested in how things are mobilized in service of politics and intercultural exchanges and the role of state bureaucrats, designers, and architects in these processes.

I joined UNSW in 2019 to develop a comprehensive program in design history and theory that introduces students to objects and ideas as outcomes of broader cultural, social, and economic processes. 

I am currently finalizing the manuscript of my first book, entitled Socialist by Design. Modern Things and Cultural Diplomacy of Cold War Poland. Based on extensive archival research into socialist Poland’s cultural, industrial, and commercial records, Socialist by Design explores the communist government’s interest in material things. It tells the story of how modern goods became an unexpected center point for Poland’s diplomacy between the late 1940s and mid-1970s. At stake was not solely an aesthetic undertaking or a commercial venture but a more comprehensive political project of alternative modernity.

My second book-length project, tentatively titled Coal Nations and Carbon Cultures, is the cultural history of coal in Poland. The project conceptualizes coal as a culturally constructed good and examines it from the perspective of international trade fairs, where the messy materiality of fossil fuels was translated into a sanitized representation of the nation.

In 2023, I was a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, The Stanford Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. In the academic year 2025/26, I will be a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo, Norway.