I met with Professor Anna Müller at the Great Commoner Café in Dearborn, only a couple of miles away from the campus of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where, since 2013 she has been working in the Department of Social Sciences. Now a full professor (since 2023) with tenure, Anna Müller holds “the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professorship in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies.”
The occasion for our meeting was a recent award Prof. Müller received: the 2024 Mieczyslaw Haiman Award was bestowed on her by the Polish American Historical Society (PAHA)for her “sustained contributions to the study of Polish Americans.”
When one looks at the list of Anna Müller’s many accomplishments, which include numerous publications (three books, with the fourth one coming out soon, scores of articles and other projects), at her record of service to her profession (past President and Treasurer of PAHA and currently President of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America), as well the many grants and awards she has received for her scholarly work, one can see why PAHA found her worthy of this prestigious award.
Research and book publications
Professor Müller’s professional interests are early 20th century Polish history, including WWII, women’s history, Jewish history, but also – as evident in her projects and publications – memory and oblivion. Not coincidently “memory and oblivion” was the theme of the study abroad trips to Poland and Ukraine which she organized for students in 2015 and 2017.
Professor Müller is a historian, sometimes described as a “sociologist” but first and foremost she is a humanist. Her fascinating work presents us with a multitude of individual, subjective, often emotional stories, that together become a powerful, polyphonic tale of the past which empowers the silenced and marginalized.
Professor Müller’s methodological approach to research can be best described as constructing “microhistories” based on interviews and thorough archival research, while gathering, analyzing and interpreting oral histories have been her favorite ways of conducting research. To her, oral histories provide the kind of insight into the past which the archival materials cannot offer.
Recorded oral histories are – as we read on the University of Leicester’s site – “particularly useful for capturing stories from minority groups or small communities who will not often be represented in more formal histories. It is also useful when there is a lack of other sorts of evidence, whether written or visual.”
In the case of Prof. Müller’s first book, “the unrepresented minority group” were female prisoners incarcerated after WWII for their political beliefs, who sometimes, and to make matters more complicated, were ardent communists.
For this reason, the book “If the Walls Could Speak. Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland”, published by Oxford University Press in 2018, was hailed as groundbreaking. By providing detailed descriptions of arrests, interrogations as well as everyday life, the book introduces the reader to the grim and complex realities of the political imprisonment of women in post-WW II Poland, previously uncharted territory. The book won Anna the Oskar Halecki Award of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America.
In 2021 Professor Müller authored a collection of interviews with female prisoners from Central European countries, such as Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, entitled “Przetrwać. Żyć dalej. Rozmowy z więźniarkami z Europy Środkowej 1945-1956” (Polish Instytut Badań Literackich PAN). In 2024 Ohio University Press published her third book, „An Ordinary Life? The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996”. Here is how Anna Müller describes the subject of her book: “Tonia Lechtman was a Polish Jewish communist who was deprived of her freedom by five different dictatorships. Her resilience in the face of oppression was built on a determination to build a world fit for human beings.” And,
“Her story — a story of someone so ordinary — teaches us to give and receive and to participate in sharing small gestures of tenderness, which can be life-sustaining. It takes courage to give and receive these gestures on a path to rebuilding oneself.” (Jacobin)
After Professor Müller settled in the US, her professional interests shifted more towards Polish American history. One of her earlier projects focusing on Polish Americans is the 2015 collaboration with photographer Tomasz Zerek and the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, with the title “The People of Hamtramck”. For this oral history project Professor Müller interviewed members of the Polish American community who at some point lived in Hamtramck. It was also her way of learning more about metropolitan Detroit, her new home. Among the interviewees were Helena Żmurkiewicz, Marcia Lewandowski, Barbara Gronet, Zenon Stępień and father Mirosław Frankowski.
As time passes, and some people whose stories were captured are not with us anymore, their voices describing immigrant life become even more valuable as a source of first-hand information about our local Polish American community after WWII. “The People of Hamtramck” became a part of the permanent collection of the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, and “live” at: https://archiwumemigranta.pl/kolekcje/oblicza-polonii-mieszkancy-hamtramck/
Professor Müller just started a new project on Polish Americans’ participation in the labor movement of the twenties and thirties.
It needs to be added that while conducting her scholarly research in the US and Poland, while writing, teaching and serving in different capacities on university committees as well as in Polish American organizations, Anna has been a working mom, raising with her husband two children, a daughter, now 21, and a son, now 15. No small feat, even if over the years she had some help from her mother, for which she is extremally grateful.
How did she get to University of Michigan-Dearborn?
Anna was born in Gdańsk, but her family came there from Lviv, via Strzelin (located south of Wrocław). Gdańsk’s history, especially experienced by her at a very young age during the Solidarity era, with civil protests happening just outside her window, sparked her interest so much, that she even wanted to write a book about her home city.
After high school Anna, an avid amateur photographer, wanted to study philosophy, but there was not a philosophy department at Gdańsk University, so she settled for political science instead. When this ended up being not very satisfying, she added history to her curriculum, and graduated with two masters, in political science and history.
In 2000 Anna moved to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend a graduate program in International Studies. There, motivated by one by her professors, and by her personal circumstances (in Geneva she met her future husband who was American; also, life in Switzerland was very expensive) she applied to graduate programs in history in North America, and in 2003 became a graduate student at Indiana University.
In 2007 she moved her family back to Poland to do her doctoral research, which she envisioned to be on the Solidarity movement, but quickly she realized that it is not what she wanted to do. At the same time, she developed interest in female prisoners from the time of Stalinism, a little-known topic in Polish history, on which she wrote her dissertation, and which in 2018 she turned into her first book.
After receiving Ph.D. in 2010, Anna started working for the then newly opened Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. There during the next three years she co-curated exhibitions on the Holocaust, concentration camps, forced labor, and eugenics. It was an important and exciting work, which she enjoyed very much, however, being a museum curator was not what Anna envisioned herself doing in the future, and when an opportunity to work at a university appeared, she moved her family first to Florida, where she taught Polish and Eastern European history at the Center of European Studies in Gainesville, and then, when the tenure-track position at UM-D opened, to her present place of work.
Teacher and educator
At UM-D, Anna Müller teaches two courses per semester and oversees the university Honors Program, which is a rather demanding job, with 350 students currently enrolled.
UM-D does not have many students of Polish descent, yet – thanks to the endowed professorship for Polish studies – every academic year one of the courses Anna teaches is about Polish history. Also, students in her “honors seminar” discuss some Poland-related texts. Her courses are very popular and her “rate your professor” scores are very high.
University professors, if possible, teach courses which relate to their academic research. In Anna’s case, however, it is much more than that, as Anna has not only researched – broadly speaking – prison environments and prisoners – but also has been teaching a course in prison, at the Macomb Correctional Facility, located in New Haven. Her class there consists of 15-16 university students and – as it is a male prison – the same number of incarcerated men (also called “inside students”.)
Her commitment to bringing education to prison and providing her university students with an eye-opening experience is unwavering, given that this two-hour class takes practically an entire day. In addition to the drive, usually 1.5 hours one way, just for security purposes, they must arrive 40 minutes before class starts. The topic of this class, which she taught six times so far, changes, but as in other of Anna’s classes, the readings include Polish authors, such as Tadeusz Borowski. Among the topics,” forbidden art” (art created in very oppressive conditions, for example in Auschwitz Birkenau and in other concentration camps) and – this semester – “individual agency and fate” which students discusses in the context of plays by Vaclav Havel and Shakespeare, among others. Anna finds teaching the class very satisfying, and what’s interesting, the “inside students” more open than the “outside students”; it has been an amazing experience for the UM-D students as well.
This, however, is not Anna’s only involvement with helping incarcerated people.
Anna is an activist, who volunteers at the prison, working with the “Theory Group”, which consists of alumni of her courses. The group not only set ups events for the prison population, but also educates people on the outside about the prison system and the challenges former inmates face, organizing, for example, workshops and conferences on the importance of prison education.
All good things come to an end …
I feel that what I wrote above only scratches the surface and there are many aspects of Professor Müller’s life and work we did not have a chance to even touch on due to the limited time of our meeting.
But having spent some time with this talented, accomplished, and all-around amazing person, made me hope that in a near future the Polish Institute of Culture and Research will organize a meeting with her, and we all will have a chance to learn more about the fascinating things she does.
I will be ready with my questions!
https://jacobin.com/2023/05/tonia-lechtman-communism-imprisonment-tenderness
Photo of Anna Müller at the ceremony from:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1592459105476854&set=pcb.1592459158810182
