Affiliated Experts

Jakub Gałęziowski | Poland

Dr Jakub Gałęziowski, social and oral historian focused especially on Polish history of WWII and its consequences. In 2021 he received PhD in history from the University of Augsburg and the University of Warsaw for the dissertation about Polish children born of war (recently published as Niedpowiedziane Bografie. Polskie dzieci urodzone z powodu wojny, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2022). Currently affiliated with University of Warsaw (Faculty of Culture and Arts), where he teaches oral history and biographical methods; author of many articles in this research field. Co-founder of the Polish Oral History Association and its President (2022-2025). Member of editorial board of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” – the Polish academic journal devoted to oral history.

Elke Kleinau | Germany

Elke Kleinau, is a Professor for the History of Education and Gender at the University of Cologne. Her main research interests are the history of girls’ and women’s education, childhood history, travel narratives, German colonial history and biographical research. She studied Education, Sociology and Psychology at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, where she received her PhD in 1985. Her habilitation also took place in 1994 at the University of Bielefeld and she received a venia legendi for General Education and the History of Education. She first worked at a Research Associate at the Faculty of pedagogy, University of Bielefeld and then as an Assistant professor at the Institute for Social- and Economic History at the University of Hamburg. After several Substitute or visiting professorships at the Universities of Bielefeld, Graz (Austria), Duisburg and Cologne she got a full professorship for the History of Education/History of Gender at the University of Cologne.

Martina Koegeler-Abdi | Sweden

Martina Koegeler-Abdi is a researcher at Human Rights Studies within the History Department of Lund University. She is currently the PI in the FORTE funded project “Historical perspectives on Scandinavian children born to IS foreign fighters.”  Her project explores the similarities and differences in the perceptions of Scandinavian children born to German soldiers after WWII and children of IS foreign fighters detained in Syria after 2019.

Martina holds degrees in women’s and gender studies, comparative cultural studies and English from the University of Graz, SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Copenhagen. She has further been a visiting research fellow at Brown University and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the Study of Consequences of War. Her research focuses on how children born of war and their families use different secrecy practices to manage vulnerabilities and claim agency within the changing historical conceptualizations of nation, race, gender, and childhood – with a special focus on the relations between self-representation, family memory and socio-cultural norms. She has recently organized an international workshop on CBOW studies at Lund university, served as a co-editor on a special issue on “The Politics of Family Secrecy” in the Journal of Family History and she is a member of the advisory board of MESEA, the Society for Multiethnic Studies in Europe and the Americas.