Kate Korycki
Assistant Professor
Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies & Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction
BA (Honours) Metropolitian University, MA (McGill), PhD (U of T)
Office: Lawson Hall
kate.korycki@uwo.ca
Biography
Kate engages comparative political sociology to track how collective memories intersect with political economy and how they affect national imaginaries and notions of belonging. Put differently, Kate’s research concerns the processes by which national identities are imagined and reimagined, and how they implicate structures of gender/sexuality, race and class in the creation of powerful, benefiting yet oblivious, majorities.
Having trained as political scientist, Kate’s work engages with sociology, anthropology, critical theory and literary theory. She is interested in the process, pleasure, and joy of writing, and in politically engaged writing.
In a broader sense, Kate is interested in imagining and prefiguring a world without capitalism, nationalism, and war.
Kate has access to two dramatically different cultural spheres and politico-economic systems. Having spent her youth in communist Poland, Kate came to Canada at 18. Shortly after arrival she joined the Canadian public service. Her last posting took her to the far north of Ontario, where she was responsible for the outreach and the delivery of the Common Experience Payment - a troubled gesture of reconciliation between Indigenous victims of Residential Schools and the Canadian state.
Research Interests
Collective memory (and amnesia); political economy and corresponding notions of personhood, public/private space, and community of care; national imaginaries and their implications with structures of gender, race and class; class as a forgotten category; communism & memory of communism; queer theory; Marxian feminism; French post-structuralism.
Teaching
GSWS 1024 Introduction to Equity, Diversity and Human Rights
GSWS 2710 Marriage in Feminist and Queer Persepctives
GSWS 2263 Intersections: Race, Class and Gender Sexuality
GSWS 3173 (English 3209G/SASAH 3392G) Introduction to Queer Theory
GSWS 3316 Women and Other Deviants under Communism and Capitalism
GSWS 3333 Homophobia & Resistance Across the Globe
GSWS9600/4470 Narrative, Archive, Memory of Race and Gender (Graduate)
GSWS9459 Professional Development (Graduate) (from 2021-2024)
Publications
Recent Book
Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory, and Jews, Poles & Communists in the 21st Century Poland. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 2023 - Theoretically, the book explores why and how elites politicize the past and how they affect democracy and national belonging. Empirically, it traces how stories of the past are used to create exclusionary societies in the present. - Shortlisted for Memory Studies Association Best Book Prize, 2025
Current Projects (Book)
What is a Canadian? Collective Memory and Canadian Innocence traces the meaning of Canadianness as it emerges in state sanctioned narratives of political leaders and school history textbooks. The book explores how a Canadian is gendered, racialized and classed, and how a majority is imagined as innocent of structures of oppression within which it operates and from which it benefits.
No, It Wasn’t Only a Gulag is travel memoir, in which Kate explores, and interacts with 4 post-communist cities, their layers of history, and present-day inhabitants and life. She is interested in how her memory of communism as a space of complicated freedom and deep engagement is rendered invisible in the present. She is also interested in how collective memory operates across languages.
Book Chapter and Articles (in print and linked or accepted)
“National Identity, Racial Imaginary and a Productive Force of a ‘Communist Jew’.” Accepted for John Bukowczyk and Halina Filipowicz’s (eds.) Pole/Jew: History, Identity, Future. Ohio University Press (Forthcoming)
“De-commemoration as healing and conflict: Canada and its colonial past and present." In Sarah Gensburger & Jenny Wüstenberg’s (eds.) (De)Commemoration: Making sense of contemporary calls for tearing down statues and renaming places. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 2024
“Le décommémoration comme guérison et conflit au Canada.” In Sarah Gensburger and Jenny Wüstenberg (eds.) Dé-Commémoration: Quand le monde déboulonnes des statues et renomme des rues. Failard. 2023
“Political Parties,” In Jenny Wüstenberg and Yiffat Gutman’s (eds.) Rutledge Handbook of Memory Activism, Rutledge, 2023
“Politicized Memory in Poland: Anti-communism and the Holocaust.” Holocaust Studies, 25:3, 2019
“Out of Gay and into Class Closet - On Politics of Identity and Reflexive Sociology in Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis - Conversation between Kate Korycki and Anna Zawadzka.” Studia Litteraria et Historica, No 7, 2018
“Memory and Politics in Post-Transition Space: the Case of Poland.” East European Politics and Societies, and Cultures. Vol. 31, Issue 3, 2017
“To Kill the Indian in a Child,” on Cultural Genocide and Transitional Justice in Canada: Interview with Kate Korycki.” Studia Litteraria et Historica, No. 5, 2016
“Desire Recast: Production of Gay Identity in Iran” (with Abouzar Nasirzadeh). Journal of Gender Studies. Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2016. - Best Section Paper, 2011, American Political Science Association
“Homophobia as a tool of Statecraft: Iran and its Queers” (with Abouzar Nasirzadeh). In Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia (eds.) Global Homophobias: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression. University of Illinois Press, 2013 - Best Section Paper, 2011, American Political Science Association
Popular Media Publications
“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” Order from Ashes Podcast (with Lobna Darwish & Naira Antoun). The Century Foundation, May 12, 2022
“The Politics of Moral Panics, a Roundtable” Transnational Trends in Citizenship (with Sabiha Allouche, Haira Bouteldja, Karma R. Chaves, Lobna Darwish, Maya Magdashi, Emma Spruce, Anna Younes and Naira Antoun). The Century Foundation, May 9, 2022
“Polish Women Reject the Catholic Church’s hold on their country.” The Conversation. November 17, 2020
Commissioned Book Reviews/Review Essays
“Remembering the Neoliberal Turn", edited by Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak.” Slavic Review, Vol. 84, Issue 1, Spring 2025: 180-182
“Queen of the Maple Leaf: Beauty Contests and Settler Femininity, by Patrizia Gentile.” Canadian Letter s, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 91, Issue 3: 366-368, 2020
“Memory, Identity, Tourism and Photography - Kate Korycki reviews David Walkowitz’s Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World, and Jonathan Webber’s Rediscovering Traces of Memory, with photographs by Chris Schwarz and Jason Francisco.” The Polish Review, Vol. 65. No. 3, 2020
“African American Philosophers and Philosophy: an Introduction to the history, concepts, and contemporary issues, by John McLendon III and Stephen C. Ferguson II, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 43, issue 13, 2020
