Spotlight on Excellence: Professor Helena Duffy and the 2026 Wrocław Summer School
The Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub is proud to highlight the contributions of Professor Helena Duffy, a distinguished member of the Academy since 2024. As a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Wrocław, Professor Duffy represents the vanguard of Polish scholarship within the Academy’s Section of Literary and Theatrical Studies.
A Polish Voice in the Pan-European Academic Community
Since her election to Academia Europaea, Professor Duffy has been an important figure in the Polish academic landscape, bridging local research excellence with international networks.
Her research has been supported by prestigious grants and scholarship, including the Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (2016-2018), the Fernandes Fellowship (2022), and the Käte Hamburger Fellowship (2026-2027), and by funding bodies such as the Soros Foundation, the National Centre for Science, and the University of Turku Institute for Advanced Studies. Since 2024.
Environmental Perspectives in Holocaust Research
Professor Duffy’s recent research introduces innovative perspectives to Holocaust studies, specifically through the lenses of ecocriticism, zoocriticism, and posthumanism. Her forthcoming project, Embodied Trauma Beyond the Human: Reparative Potential of Holocaust Literature, challenges anthropocentric views by examining how trauma affects both human and non-human organisms within their natural environments.
Her bibliography includes many journal articles and book chapters, and of two monographs: World War II in Andrei Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction (Brill 2018) and The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction (Legenda 2022). She has co-edited issues of academic journals such as Holocaust Studies, French Forum, Eastern European Holocaust Studies, and Journal of Holocaust Research, and three collected volumes: Storying the Ecocatastrophe (Routledge 2024), Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Legenda 2024), and The Holocaust and Ecocide in Culture and Public Debate (Routledge, forthcoming).
Leading the 2026 Summer School in Wrocław
Under the auspices of the University of Wrocław and in collaboration with the Academia Europaea Wrocław Hub, the University of Edinburgh, and the French NGO Yahad In-Unum, Professor Duffy is leading a major international initiative: the Summer School “Holocaust Literature and Film: Sites, Memory, Representation”.
This project is supported by the Hubert Curien Fund, a prestigious grant awarded to enable Academy members to launch high-impact activities. By supporting this Summer School, the Curien Fund facilitates cross-disciplinary dialogue and helps bridge research boundaries across the European academic community.
Taking place from September 7–11, 2026, this program exemplifies the Academy’s mission of knowledge dissemination and internationalization. The School explores contemporary literary and cinematic representations of the Holocaust, with particular attention to topographical sites that functioned as spaces of persecution, extermination, and commemoration. It examines how these landscapes are reimagined in narrative and film and how they participate in commemorative practices. The School also interrogates the politics of these practices or their absence. Key thematic strands include landscape and spatial memory, the ecology of genocide and commemoration, and transcorporeality as a framework for understanding the entanglement of bodies, matter, and place.
The Summer School offers diverse educational and cultural activities. It combines formal lectures with interactive workshops, seminars, and film screenings followed by discussion. Participants have the opportunity to engage with the history of Lower Silesian Jews by taking part in a guided tour of sites connected to Jewish life in Wrocław and by visiting the former concentration camp of Gross-Rosen in Rogoźnica. Participants also enjoy the opportunity to become familiar with Ashkenazy cuisine by dining at the local Jewish restaurant Sarah. On completing the School and submitting written work, participants may earn 4 ECTS credits.
The summer school offers 35 partially funded fellowships to MA and PhD students worldwide. We cover the participation fee, accommodation, and some meals, as well as a range of cultural activities. To apply, please send a completed application form to Helena Duffy (helena.duffy@uwr.edu.pl) by 1 June 2026.
Professor Duffy’s leadership in this program underscores the vital role of Polish members of Academia Europaea in fostering high-level expert panels and educational excellence in Central and Eastern Europe.
