Collegium Carolinum,
the German Historical Institute Warsaw,
and the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe
in collaboration with the Cold War Research Group at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and Masaryk Institute and Archive CAS
cordially invite you to the lecture
Dr. Katja Castryk-Naumann (GWZO Leipzig):
Expertise and International Politics. Polish Economists in the UN Secretariat (1946 to the 1960s)
Commentary: Dr. Jan Surman (MIA CAS)
Moderation: Lucie Dušková, Ph.D. (GWZO Leipzig)
Wednesday, November 23 2022, 5.30 p. m.
Faculty of Arts, nám. Jana Palacha 1/2, room 001
The lecture will be streamed via Zoom. For the link, please contact florian.ruttner@collegium-carolinum.de
The history of international politics is much more than the history of diplomacy and state representation. International organizations had a big share in it, and the broad spectrum of actors who were engaged in these institutions, including experts, international civil servants, and all of sorts of activists. Based on this trend, this lecture deals with the early years of the UN headquarters in New York and its department of economic affairs which was key in the negotiations of international economic affairs after World War II. The departments’ work was shaped strongly by Polish economists who entered it as officials. Tracing their careers within the UN secretariat and their professional biographies before and after the service in the UN enables to reconstruct entanglements between international and Polish histories from a fresh angle. Connections include the origins of the economic intelligence of the UN secretariat in the expertise and networks of Polish and East Central European economists of the inter-war-period and during the war as well later collaboration across the divides of the Cold War.
Katja Castryck-Naumann studied history, political science and philosophy at the universities of Leipzig, Edinburgh and Vienna. She was visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Aarhus Universitet, Université Science-Po, Lyon and CNRS Paris. She got research fellowships from the DHI, Washington D.C., the University of Chicago and European Science Foundation. Since 2020 she has been a coordinator of young researchers’ support at the GWZO. She is the author of Laboratorien der Weltgeschichtsschreibung: Lehre und Forschung an den Universitäten Chicago, Columbia und Harvard von 1918 bis 1968, Göttingen 2018.