Dr Katarzyna Jezowska

Katarzyna (Kasia) Jezowska is a Senior Lecturer at the UNSW School of Art and Design. Her work is situated at the intersection of modern European and design history and examines the material cultures of state socialism and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. More broadly, she is interested in how things are mobilised in service of politics and is committed to integrating design into the study of history.

At UNSW, she offers a range of courses on Design History and Theory that introduce students to objects and ideas as outcomes of broader cultural, social, and economic processes. She welcomes PhD candidates interested in Central /Eastern Europe, material culture, the Cold War, as well as design and exhibition histories.

Her first book, Socialist by Design: The Politics of Material Culture in Cold War Poland, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. Situated at the intersection of modern European and design history, Socialist by Design examines attempts to rationalise and materialise a distinct world of socialism. Structured around five industrial exhibitions organised abroad between the 1940s and 1970s, the book illuminates how Poland used design to build relationships with the world and to materialise socialist promises at home. As part of this process, design was used to distinguish Poland from the Soviet Union and to appeal to the rest of the world, while also being presented as a cure for the problems of the national economy, a tool to create an equal society, and a means of humanising the regime. The book proposes a new reading of the relationship between the state bureaucracy and the creative intelligentsia, which in turn offers a vantage point for observing how political ideas were given material form.

She is currently working on a new research project that examines the intersection of industrial production, design, and resource extraction. By focusing on the development and promotion of coal culture in Poland, it explores the practical and conceptual links between the natural world and national resources under state socialism. More broadly, the project examines rhetorical and visual strategies that rendered nature political, national, and modern.

She is also a CI at the ARC Linkage Project “Transforming Australian Design Cultures Through the Department Store 1954–75”, led by Mark Ian Jones. The project is a collaboration between UNSW Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, the Powerhouse Museum and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

She has held fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, at the Centre for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Her scholarly interest in international cultural diplomacy has developed in parallel with her curatorial practice and engagement with museums and galleries, including Triennale Museum, Milan; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the National Museum in Warsaw.