Qualifications

BA (Yale); MA (Columbia); PhD (Columbia)

Academic background

My previous academic positions were at the College of Charleston, the University of Virginia, and Newcastle University. I have held postdoctoral fellowships at the European University Institute (Florence) and FWF/Wiesenthal Institute (Vienna).

Undergraduate teaching

I teach Europe Divided, 1914-1989; The Global Twentieth Century, 1930-2003; General History IV 1815-1914; Politics, Culture, and Society in the Cold War; Revolutions of 1989; and Disciplines of History.

Research interests

My interests lie principally in the social and cultural history of 20th-century Poland in a global context; everyday life under state socialism; autobiography and testimony, especially ‘everyman autobiographies’ ca. 1930–50; and the history of social science.

Featured publications

“The Polish Peasant on the Sugar Plantation: Bronisław Malinowski, Feliks Gross, and Józef Obrębski in the New World” (under review), and “Introduction,” in special issue: “Inventing the Global: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modern Social Science, 1914-1950,” Contemporary European History (publication expected 2018).

“Letter from Linz: An Archive Story,” S:I.M.O.N. - Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation 4, 1 (2017): 4-20.

“Halina Krahelska’s Warsaw Chronicle (1941-1943): Documenting the Holocaust on the Other Side of the Wall.” In Als der Holocaust noch keinen Namen hatte. Zur frühen Aufarbeitung des NS-Massenmords an Jüdinnen und Juden/Before the Holocaust had its Name. Early Confrontations of the Nazi Mass Murder of the Jews, Regina Fritz, Béla Rásky, and Éva Kovács, eds., New Academic Press, 2016, 87-110.

“La voix et le regard : les régimes visuels des concours d’autobiographies polonais, 1930-1984,“ Critique internationale 68 (Jul.-Sept. 2015) – in special issue “Voir l’histoire : sources visuelles et écriture du regard”: 61-79.

“The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Memoir and Social Rights,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3, 3 (2012): 297-319.

Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56, Cornell University Press, 2013. 

For further publications see https://lebow.weebly.com/publications

Other interests and activities

I enjoy gardening, yoga and community fruit harvesting.