Aleksandra Twardowska

Aleksandra Twardowska, has a Ph.D. in linguistics, and works as assistant professor an the Institute of Slavonic Philology (Department for Slavonic Languages and Balkanology) at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Her doctoral thesis, which she defended at the University of Gdańsk, was on the anthroponymy of the Sephardic Jews in Sarajevo before World War II. She co-edits the series Getting to Know the Balkans. Her academic interests involve: the culture and history of Balkan Jews, the language of Balkan Sephardim (Judeo-Spanish/Ladino), Jewish and Slavonic anthroponymy, Balkan minorities, Balkan languages.

At Laboratory POSTCOMER she works on Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian Jews. She is focusing especially on the question of identity (national, cultural, religious, ethnic) among members of Jewish Communities in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb after 1991, but on the basis of their memories emerging from the Yugoslav period. Primarily, the research will focus on Jewish sources, i.e. magazines, newspapers and weeklies published after 1945 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and since 1991 up to now, to mention “Ha-kol”, “Novi Omanut”, “Hadašon” (Zagreb), “Jevrejski almanah”, “Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog muzeja” (Belgrade), “Bilten”, “Jevrejski glas” (Sarajevo).