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Background:
Mary E. Cygan has been at the Stamford Campus
of the University of Connecticut since fall 1990
where she teaches the United States history survey,
American immigration, American biography, the history
of women in the United States and an introductory
Western Civilization survey. She incorporates oral
history into several of her courses at the Stamford
Campus. Recent examples include student interviews
with residents of the Stamford Manor (public housing
targeted by a controversial urban renewal proposal)
and former employees of Yale and Towne, the largest
employer in Stamford until 1950. In 1998-99 she
served as the Acting Director of Women's Studies
at the Stamford Campus and remains a member of the
Stamford Campus Women's Studies Advisory Group.
Her research has focused on Polish American religion,
family life, popular culture, and politics.
She began her undergraduate work at the University
of Chicago, was a graduate fellow at the Institute
on East Central Europe at Columbia University and
received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University
in 1989. She has delivered papers at annual meetings
of the American Historical Association, the Social
Science History Association, and the Polish American
Historical Association and at conferences at the
Immigration History Research Center (University
of Minnesota), the University of Bremen, and the
Institute for Polonia Research of the Jagiellonian
University in Krakow. She has been involved in community
history projects in Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee
and developed the Oral History Archives of Chicago
Polonia (at the Chicago Historical Society) which
recorded the life stories of approximately 130 immigrants.
She is currently working on an article on Polish
American folk theater and revising a manuscript
on Polish American socialism.
Selected Publications:
- "A Man of His Times: Paul Robeson and the
Press, 1924-1976," Pennsylvania History 66,
no.1 (Winter 1999): 27-46
- "Inventing Polonia: Notions of Polish
American Identity, 1870-1990," Prospects
(An Annual published by Cambridge University Press),
23 (1998): 209-246
- "Polish American Socialism," chapter
in the anthology, Immigrant Radicalism, Paul Buhle
and Dan Georgakas, eds.( Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1996):148-184
- "Polish Women and Emigrant Husbands,"
in Dirk Hoerder and Horst Rossler, eds., Roots
of the Transplanted, (Boulder: East European Monographs,
Columbia University Press, 1994): 359-374.
- "The New Art: Polish American Radio Comedy
During the 1930's." Polish American Studies,
XLV (autumn, 1988): 5-21.
- "Ethnic Parish as Compromise, The Spheres
of Clerical and Lay Authority in a Polish American
Parish, 1909-1930." Occasional Papers Series
of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American
Catholicism, Series 13. (South Bend: Cushwa Center
at Notre Dame University, 1983): 1-37.
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