Jamie Zelechowski is Assistant Professor of Instruction for German in the Department of French, German, Italian, and Slavic at Temple University. Her research interests include German-Polish relations, memory, borders and migration, and film studies. Dr. Zelechowski has written on cinematic representations of forced migration in German and Polish cinema. Her current work examines the role of cinema in the resignification of regions that have been subjected to border changes and population transfers. She received her PhD in Germanic Languages from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017.
Jamie Zelechowski
Wolf Humanities Center Regional Fellow
2021—2022 Forum on Migration
Jamie Zelechowski
Assistant Professor of Instruction (German), French, German, Italian, and Slavic, Temple University
Resignifying People and Territory: German and Polish Cinema vis-à-vis the Potsdam Agreement and Beyond
This project studies the role of Polish, East German, and West German cinema in the resignification of people and territory in the wake of the forced migrations that accompanied the changes to the German and Polish borders in 1945. I have found that several common perspectivally constructed, chronotopic ‘scapes’ characterize the resignification of the territories in question; the chronotopic ‘scape’ permits the transnational study of the border region without sacrificing the nuance of historical context. By reconstructing the cinematic palimpsest of the former German territories from both sides of the postwar border, I provide a much-needed transnational perspective on the consequences of the border changes as represented in film. The project contributes to the fields of border and migration studies and transnational film studies.