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With this visual essay—combining screenings of newly collected archival films with live narration—Agata Zborowska explores the possibility of, and sketches a framework for, a new visual history of Polish Chicago. The talk draws on a collection she has been building since 2024, comprising oral history interviews and more than 2,100 amateur films and home movies preserved by over sixty individuals and families. By treating the practice of archiving as ethnographic fieldwork, it traces how diaporicity has manifested—or has not manifested—visually and develops the concept of diasporic (in)visibility. She invites the audience to reflect on what these overlooked and underestimated sources, amateur films and home movies, reveal about the history of Chicago Polonia and the ways generations of the Polish diaspora imagined themselves, negotiated belonging, staged visibility, and maintained ties to the homeland. At the same time, she will discuss how this distinctly Polish American case study can contribute to broader understandings of diasporic identity, visual culture, and the social life of images.This event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago, with the gracious support of the Maria Kuncewicz Fund for the Study of Polish Literature.
When:
Monday, November 9, 2026, 4:30pm
Where:
Social Sciences Tea Room, Social Science Research Building (SSRB 201), 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago
Agata Zborowska is a postdoctoral fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, she is working on a project, “Critical Archives of Ordinariness: Vernacular Moving Image Practices and Migrant Identity in Polish Chicago” (www.not-so-ordinary.us), that investigates home movies and related oral histories of Polish Chicago before the digital era. From 2023 to 2026, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and a scholar-in-residence at Chicago Film Archives, where she worked with Chicago’s Polish diaspora to build and preserve a large-scale collection of amateur films and home movies documenting Polish American life in the twentieth century. Agata is the author of Życie rzeczy w powojennej Polsce (The Life of Things in Post-war Poland, 2019), which received the Inka Brodzka-Wald Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in the contemporary humanities in Poland. She has published in Archival Science, History and Anthropology, and the Journal of Intercultural Studies, among others. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the European Commission, the Kościuszko Foundation, the Polish National Science Centre, Centre of Community Archives, the Franke Institute University of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, Al Larvick Conservation Fund, and the National Film Preservation Foundation. Agata co-edits the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, published by the International Association for Media and History.
Cover footage source: Antonina Blazonczyk Film Collection (preserved and digitized thanks to Not-So-Ordinary).
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Event venue
The University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave,Chicago,IL,United States
Tickets
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