Warsaw 2013

Beth Holmgren, Professor Emerita of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, has published widely on Polish literature, theater, popular culture, and film; Russian literature, film, and women's studies; and Russian and Polish artists and performers in the North American diaspora. Over the last decade, she has produced a series of articles exploring the Polish Jewish foundations of popular culture in the interwar period and the wartime and postwar diaspora. Holmgren's scholarship and labors in the field of Slavic and East European Studies have won multiple national awards from ACLS, AATSEEL, ASEEES, ASTR, and other organizations.

In addition to her work on editorial boards, fellowship committees, and external reviews, Holmgren served as President of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2008 (the largest organization in the Slavic field outside the region itself), during which period she helped oversee the Association's move to a new, financially less exorbitant location and the hiring of several new staff members. Holmgren served as President of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the 2003-2005 term. Holmgren also chaired her departments at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke for almost half of her 38 years in the field.

From 2020 through post-retirement in June 2023, Holmgren's research has concentrated on Polish film from the 1930s to the present day. Her most recent book, co-authored with Professor Helena Goscilo (The Ohio State University), is Polish Cinema Today: A Bold New Era in Film (August 2021), which explores the reflorescence and great thematic diversification of Polish film in this century. Contextualizing and analyzing scores of Polish films on themes ranging from representations of the Catholic Church's influence and prewar/wartime/postwar Jewish-gentile relations to the experience of migrant Poles and portraits of queer identity, Polish Cinema Today provides a smart introduction to general film scholars and students as well as cinephiles. In 2022, Choice Reviews named it an Outstanding Academic Title.

Holmgren's most recently published articles include:

“Early Polish-Language Musicals: The Tug of War between Genre Film and Cabaret.” In Singing a Different Tune: The Slavic Film Musical in Transnational Context, ed. Helena Goscilo (Academic Studies Press, 2023): 39-81. 

“Eugeniusz Bodo (1899-1943): The Star Who Stole the Show.” In Starlight and Stargazers: Slavic Screen Celebrities, ed. Helena Goscilo (Academic Studies Press, 2024): 33-56.

“From Taverns to Courtyards and Cafes: How the Shtetl Migrated into Fin-de-siècle Warsaw.” In The Jewish Inn: Between Practice and Phantasm. Ed. Halina Goldberg and Bożena Shallcross. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2025: 80-100.

“Hanna Polak’s Documentaries of Russia’s Lost Souls.” The Polish Review, vol. 70, nr. 1, 2025: 90-111.

"The American Identities of Krystyna Bierzynska Stamper: Veteran, Emigre, Feminist, Holocaust Survivor," Polish American Studies, Vol. 83, issue 1-2, 2026.

Holmgren's next project, provisionally titled Daughters of Poland's Second Republic, focuses on the postwar memoirs written by female soldiers who served in the Anders Army (1942-1946), a free Polish force under British command in World War II. The vast majority of these enlisted women, like their male colleagues, had survived hunger, disease, and exhausting slave labor in Siberia and Central Asia after the Soviet army--initially allied with the German army--deported them as "enemy aliens" in 1940. Few English-language sources focus on these female soldiers' outstanding wartime service and complicated postwar resettlement.  Holmgren's book examines how the memoirists represent their evolution from starving deportee into educated, trained Polish soldier traveling the long route through the Mid-East to the Italian campaign where the Anders Army proved its valor. In the book's final section she compares how these female veterans, whose homeland in eastern Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union, accommodated themselves to a new, Sovietized Poland or improvised new lives, while striving to preserve their Polish identity, in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.