Rafał Kuś: I’d like to start by asking you what brought you here to the Jagiellonian?

Gregory Domber: I’ve been to Poland before, I’ve lived here in the early 2000s, working on what ended up being my dissertation and what ended up being my first book. With my wife and I coming up for a sabbatical, we wanted to come back to Poland. I have been working on this project for a few years now, about American exchanges to Poland and the effects of these exchanges on, in particular, of the Round Table process in Poland, but politics more generally. The Institute seemed like a good space for that, given the focus on American studies of course. I’m not actually an expert in Polish history, I’m more of an expert in American foreign policy towards Poland and this fit really well. And then, it was a place that my wife and I wanted to bring our kids. So part of this was the attraction of Kraków as a small, very livable city, and the other part was the Jagiellonian’s general reputation. I knew I would have all the library resources I needed here, I knew that the Institute had experts on the Polish diaspora and on the American policy and that there would an interest in supporting my work. So that’s why I chose this Institute in particular.

RK: Thank you so much. What makes an American scholar focus on this part of our common history? Did you have any previous associations with Poland?

GD: There’s two stories. The professional story and the personal story. And they actually combine pretty readily. So the professional story is that I was born in 1974, I was fifteen when the Berlin wall fell. I saw on television the collapse of communism. And I wasn’t tied into Poland then. I was taking German in high school. I was very well aware of what was happening in Germany and this was a big sort of media moment in the United States. And so I became totally fascinated by the collapse of communism and Eastern Europe’s re-emergence as just Europe. A story that really has played out over the course of my life as something I’ve watched and seen.

And so my initial interest came out of just watching the happiness and joy of East Germans going to West Germany for the very first time. NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw was there at that night and it was just amazing to see. I still get like choked up when I see those images and those video reports. And so I went to college and I got interested in the American foreign policy towards the Soviet bloc as it was known at that time and particularly interested in Czechoslovakia in 1968. I became really interested in the ways the communist societies tried to reform and how that didn’t work or did work.

Then, after college, I started working at two different academic institutions or research institutions in Washington, D.C. One is called the National Security Archive and another is called the Cold War International History Project. The National Security Archive basically fights the U.S. government to declassify its foreign policy information, using totally legal means. It’s sort of like Wikileaks but legalized, using the Freedom of Information Act and other lawsuits to pry information from the U.S. government about what it was doing, what it knew about abroad. The Cold War International History Project did a very similar thing but basically in the 1990s and through the early 2000s spent a lot of time in the Eastern European archives, understanding the European and the Soviet perspective on particular crises. And so I got put on this team that focused on what they called “Soviet Flashpoints”.

Initially I started to work on a book on 1956 in Hungary, sort of the American perspective, Eastern European perspective, Chinese perspective, and eventually, when I was working as a research assistant for the National Security Archive and Cold War International History Project, it was 1999. And so, I was asked to be part of a team that set up for a conference that was run by the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. So Andrzej Paczkowski was our key contact there. Paczkowski hosted the event and I got to go along as a research assistant. At the event, you had a smaller table in the middle that had participants in the events of 1989 – from the opposition, from the government, from the church – talking about their experiences. And outside of that group was 15, 20, maybe 30 historians, and they were armed with a document collection of American foreign policy records, of Polish records, things from the Politbiuro, things from the Soviet Central Committee, from other Eastern European countries. So, for three days, the historians quizzed and grilled the participants on what they were doing and what they were thinking. There were a couple of Soviet representatives there and the American ambassador was there, by the name of John Davis. I got to know John Davis and I became immediately fascinated with his experience here in Poland in the 1980s. It was very clear from that conference that John Davis had a very close relationship with all sides. He knew everybody, there were many people that he was very close with, and so seeing that, when I started graduate school I focused on that relationship. And so I started coming to Poland, to the Jagiellonian for the summer school, the language training program. I did that twice. My first Fulbright, I was up in Warsaw at the Institute of Political Studies, but focused on the issues of the 1980s. So I started using Polish archives, I started using Polish materials, and ultimately my first book and my dissertation are more based on Polish materials than they are on American materials, because it was easier to get stuff from Polish archives, particularly from the Archiwum Akt Nowych and the IPN early on, than it was to get stuff from the American archives. That’s the professional side of how I got really focused on Poland.

Personally, on the first Fulbright, my (now) wife was also on a Fulbright. She was down here in Kraków and I was in Warsaw, and we met at the sort of initial gatherings that you have, and then we started seeing more of each other. So I’d come to Kraków once or twice a month to spend some time down here with her. She stayed an extra year but I went back to the States. And we continued our relationship and now we’re married and have two kids. So Poland is also this really special personal place where my wife and I shared a lot of history. She’s an amazing poet and a translator of Polish poetry, so we don’t really share academic interests but we do share these regional interests. So we come back whenever we can. And we really wanted to give our children a chance to get to know the place a little bit too, because it is so special and so central to our personal relationship. And so these two things - the professional and the personal - came together. It probably explains, too, my fascination with exchange programs and how they affect people. Because in my own life, without the Fulbright in 2003, without my experiences coming to Poland after that, with different pots of money, I wouldn’t be who I am professionally and I wouldn’t be who I am personally.

RK: That’s an amazing story, especially the personal part. It’s so great that Poland brought you together.

DG: Poland is a lovely, welcoming, warm place. I don’t know why any American wouldn’t want to come and visit. I used to tell this joke when I was here in 2003-2004 – so this is right at the time that the American war in Afghanistan is going on, American war in Iraq is starting up – and when my friends asked how it is, I’d always say that there are more pro-American Poles than there were pro-Americans in my neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It’s always been such a welcoming place. Poles are amazing hosts. The tradition of being good hosts has always played to my advantage, for sure.

RK: So now you’re in Poland with the rest of your family and your stay here in Poland involves both teaching and research activities. What are the projects that you are focusing on right now?

GD: My research is focused on trying to better understand the influence of American exchanges on the Round Table process, and I’ve worked on this for a long time. But the way I’ve gone about this is take a digital humanities approach methodologically, and so I’ve worked for years now, creating a dataset of all the participants in the Round Table. There’s 567 of them, all together, a huge group, to look at their professional and institutional affiliations to each other. Where did they go to school, what organizations were they part of, where did they work. Not so much how did they know each other personally but how did they exist out in the world and what were their connections.

Working together with a colleague, Dr. Kelly Bodwin, at my current university Cal Poly, we then created a visualization application to be able to see those connections, and kind of look at these networks and how they changed over time. And so right now we’re at this amazing moment when we’ve just completed the dataset and now we’ve got the application up and running, so literally in the last week and half I had my first chance to really dive into what these visualizations show us.

What I’m doing now is taking the list that I’ve created of Poles who came to the United States on official government exchanges and superimposing that list on the Round Table process and looking at where the people who were on international exchanges fit within the networks and looking for patterns of where they are, patterns of pathways of influence basically, thinking of their place within the domestic sphere. And so that digital humanities part was really my focus until about month and a half ago.

Now on top of that I’m going to try to interview the surviving members who were on exchanges, who were also on the Round Table. Last week I was in Warsaw and I interviewed Jerzy Wiatr and Janusz Reykowski, both in their nineties. I’m now getting into the qualitative methods that I’m more used to as a historian. Now that I’ve located the key people and I’ve figured out which groups I want to focus on, based on the network visualizations, I can go back and interview the surviving people, I can focus on their memoirs if they’re not still alive and look through the materials that way, to see what other patterns I see and what stories I can tell based on this digital humanities visualization.

RK: That’s a very innovative approach. I’m looking forward to reading your work as soon as it’s published! Your wife is also a scholar – was she able to use the opportunity of you being here for her research activities?

GD: She also has a Fulbright this year. We both have our own individual Fulbrights. She’s also affiliated with the Jagiellonian University with the Centre for Translation, it’s in the English Philology. She has her own projects, focusing on poetry but also she’s working on a translation of the Polish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka, a Jewish-Polish poet of the interwar years who ended up being murdered here in Kraków in the last days of the German occupation. She is born in Lwów, decides on life in Warsaw and in Poland, embraces Polish identity and Polish language. A 20-year-old poet taking the world by storm. There’s been a lot of interest in her in Poland in the last ten years, and there’s increasing interest in the States as well about her work, both as a younger Polish poet and as a Jewish voice. She’s been working on these projects.

RK: You told me that you took some Polish lessons and your wife is an expert in translation. Do you speak Polish?

GD: Mówię tylko słabo po polsku. I understand a lot, but living in the place in California we live in, I don’t have an opportunity to practice much. My wife and I used it as a sort of secret language for our children, but we’re not good enough and we got worse and worse and worse. And so I speak enough Polish to certainly make it around the shops and cafes and ordering food. I would not be able to teach my class at all.

I’m amazingly impressed by with the level of English of everyone in the Institute and your students as well. Really impressed with the level of fluency. Among the faculty it is undeniable how strong all of you are in English and it allows scholars like me to be pretty lazy, because I can get around. Particularly in the city of Kraków as well, I can get around with English if I wanted to. I try to keep up my Polish but it’s not very good. It’s mostly passive and it’s mostly for reading and I have some specialized terminology, but I could never give a lecture in Polish. It would take me far too long to create it.

RK: You have visited Poland several times in the last couple of decades. Now you are here with your children as well. I would like to ask you if and how Poland has changed in that time and what are your kids’ impressions of being here in Poland?

GD: Poland has changed remarkably. When I first came in 1999, it was a grey fall November experience. I remember celebrating Poland joining the EU later. There was a big party on the Rynek with an amazing abstract art dance presentation of all Polish history and it was amazing. It was ridiculous in its interpretation, but it was also a lot of fun. And so seeing how the University’s been growing since then, how international Polish students are now (the Erasmus program was just starting up when I was here in 2003), and how connected Poland is with the rest of the world, I think that’s been really clear to me.

Also I mean the level of economic development. What I’ve been really struck by this time is how well the university is funded here. I work for a state school in the United States and your buildings and your physical infrastructure is as good if not better than American universities. My wife has a spot down by the castle. And, you know, it’s an old building, it’s got its drawbacks, it’s got its advantages, it’s got its beauty. Jagiellonian has clearly done very good things to keep itself as a top university, there’s no question about that. The total Europeanness of Poland has struck me. It feels no different than other parts of Europe at this point. It did earlier but it doesn’t anymore. I mean there’s different architecture, there are different styles but particularly in the cosmopolitan areas it feels very much a part of the wider world.

My children are both enrolled in international schools here, so for them a lot of the awareness has been about how different the schooling is and how different the systems are. One is in a British school here in Kraków and the other is in a Polish international school. They are also very enjoying travelling around and seeing different things. But they are both pretty young and so it’s hard to really know just yet what’s going to strike them. A lot about language, a lot about how surprised they are how much English is around. Neither of them spoke any Polish when they got here. My younger daughter, who is in the Polish international school, is picking up more. My older daughter has been studying on DuoLingo, so understands a fair amount now. But with the kids I’m not really sure what’s going to stay and what not. I’ll have to ask in five years or ten years what they remember.

RK: You teach a course here at the Jagiellonian. Could you tell me more about the topic of the course and also about the experience as a visiting professor here at the Jagiellonian, about the students, your overall experiences?

GD: I’m teaching a class, a broad survey on U.S.-Eastern European relations from World War I to the present. The readings are based on one piece of scholarship and a number of primary sources. Having this background of working for the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project, I’m a kind of document fetishist and I try to bring in as many primary sources as I can. Overall I’ve been impressed with the level of the students, particularly in their ease at working in English. Instead of a big exam at the end, I had them do a number of short writing assignments throughout the course of the term and the materials I’ve seen so far have been quite good!

The facilities are amazing. I wish I had classrooms as nice as the ones downstairs here. I think one of the things that’s been interesting to me is the different expectation of engagement. So, in the American system there’s a lot of focus on group work and active learning in the classroom space. My sense is that here there’s a bit more expectation of being taught rather than learning, if there’s a difference there. Students are very good, very comfortable with listening to me, taking good notes, and synthesizing information, but when I take a step further and ask them to make an argument of their own or to discuss particular things in class, there’s a little more resistance to do that. Not amongst everyone, but I think that difference is still apparent between the European and the American system.

It is about being more interactive and back and forth. I can see it in my children’s education as well. In the British international school that my daughter is going to, it’s much more about an expert in the room, teaching everyone, and everyone absorbing that. And pedagogically, the United States has more and more moved towards active engagement. You’re not just telling students what to know, you’re checking in with them and hearing back from them what they’ve picked up, what they’re adding to themselves. Most students aren’t quite used to that yet here. This more active-learning pedagogical approach is something that I’m bringing to the classroom that may be a bit outside of what they’re used to. I hope the students learn something from this experience.

RK: Were you able to collaborate with some of our scholars here in the Institute?

GD: Sure. I’ve met with a lot of people in the Institute and had good conversations that helped me in different directions. Marcin Fatalski, in particular, was very helpful. Another big advantage of being here for me is that I teach a large number of classes back in my home institution, and so to have all this research time has been amazing, to have access to all the Polish materials at the library. Working at a small state school in California, getting access to non-American publication can be quite difficult, particularly some of the more obscure biographical dictionaries. But here it’s been easy, and that to me has been a huge boost.

RK: What about your future research plans?

GD: Right now I‘m really focused on getting through this project. I feel like I’m finally at this critical moment of creating enough momentum to finally write up the book. I’ve had a sense of where it’s going for a long time but I’m focused on creating a monograph. So that’s going to be my focus for the next few months: interviewing people, as many folks as I can, tracking down a few sources here and there, but primarily focusing on the human element. Many of the exchange participants who also took part in the Round Table are no longer with us, unfortunately, but there are still probably fifteen or twenty that I still want to track down.

In terms of future plans, I’m not sure. Each time I’ve come to Poland, it sparked something that took me to a new direction and I don’t often know what that is at the moment. One of the things that I do want to do, I’ve talked with Tomek Pugacewicz about it, is kind of expanding the analysis of U.S. exchange programs to look at the first few governments that come after 1989 and look at where exchange participants fell in those governments, to see if there’s a broader effect once the change happened, probably up to the Miller government.

RK: Thank you so much for the interview!

GD: Thank you.