Diana Sacilowski earned her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages & Literatures, along with graduate certificates in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and Criticism and Interpretive Theory, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2021. She is now a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University, where she teaches Polish language and various Slavic culture courses. Her major research interests involve 19th–21st century Polish culture with specialization in Polish-Jewish culture, Holocaust and memory studies, and late/post-Communist literature.
She is also currently working on a book project, stemming from her dissertation, in which she examines the implications of silence in Polish cultural texts of the last forty years that deal with Poland’s Jewish history. Specifically, she analyzes how various writers use oblique methods of representation—allusion and reference, pointedly erased, missing and elided words, mute(d) objects, places, and people—not to articulate trauma or to circumvent difficult historical realities, but rather to engage with longstanding myths regarding the “Jew” and to posit new modes of understanding Polish and Jewish, and Polish-Jewish, identities. She received various fellowships during her time at the University of Illinois in support of this project, including the School of Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Humanities Research Institute Graduate Student Fellowship, and the Gendell Family and Shiner Family Fellowship in Jewish Studies.