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Easton Musicologist Barbara Milewski will give a lecture on “Prisoners’ Songs of the Nazi Concentration Camps” 4:15 p.m. today in the Farinon Center’s Limburg Theater.
Free and open to the public, the talk is sponsored by the departments of religious studies and English, the Jewish Studies minor program, and Hillel Society.
“What compelled ordinary prisoners in the Nazi camps to risk torture or execution in order to write songs, hold clandestine concerts, and stage musical-theatrical events? Relying on material culled from the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, this talk will explore the ‘unofficial’ everyday music-making in the camps, focusing particularly on the song creations of former political prisoner and Sachsenhausen camp survivor Aleksander Kulisiewicz,” says Milewski.
She is working on Ballads and Broadsides: Aleksander Kulisiewicz’s Songs from Sachsenhausen, a compact disc recording with program essays and translations set for release this winter. Milewski is author of From Madagascar to Sachsenhausen: Singing about ‘Race’ in a Nazi Camp, an article to be published next month in the journal Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. She has conducted extensive work for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, including selection and translation of Polish political prisoners’ songs; producing a comprehensive catalog of the Aleksander Kulisiewicz Collection; and completing music research, translations, and commentaries for the publications Days of Remembrance 1944-1994 and Days of Remembrance 1945-1995. She has shared her research through many other publications, conference presentations, and other invited talks.
Last November, she gave a talk at Lafayette on “National Music Then and Now,” preceding a Williams Center concert by Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Milewski is the recipient of 11 grants, awards, and fellowships, including the Dziewanowski Memorial Award for the most outstanding dissertation on a Polish topic this year, awarded by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; and a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for studies from January-August 2002.
She earned a Ph.D. and M.F.A in musicology from Princeton University, a master’s in music history from State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a bachelor’s degree (cum laude) with a major in political science from Bowdoin College.
She also studied in the Jagiellonian University Language Program, Krakow, Poland, in summer 1989 and spring 1996, and at the Austro-American Institute for Political Studies, Vienna, Austria, in fall 1987.