Alicja Iwańska

Alicja Iwańska (also known as Alicia Iwanska; 13 May 1918 – 26 September 1996) was a Polish sociologist, academic and writer. Born into the landed gentry of Poland, her family were members of the intelligentsia and encouraged Iwańska to pursue her literary dreams. She began publishing poetry in 1935 in various literary journals. After her high school studies, she enrolled in philosophy courses at the University of Warsaw and went on to study for a master's degree. When World War II broke out, she joined the resistance movement and served as a courier. Involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, at the end of the war she became part of the secret anti-communist opposition. When arrests began involving the underground movement, Iwańska was forced to flee to the United States in 1948, where she reluctantly applied for asylum.

With little proficiency in English, Iwańska initially had difficulty in adjusting. She enrolled at Columbia University to complete her PhD studies, but would not finish her degree until 1957. Unable to secure a professorship, she took several short contracts, working at traditionally black colleges in the segregated South such as Atlanta University and Talladega College. There she lectured on the similarities between political, religious, and racial persecution in Europe and segregation restrictions in the United States. In 1954, she moved to the University of Chicago and began studying with the American anthropologist Sol Tax. Eager to travel to Mexico to conduct research, in 1957 she married and became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her work with the Mazahua people earned her recognition as a sociologist by UNESCO and eventually led to a professorship at the State University of New York at Albany in 1965, where she worked until her retirement in 1985.

Having never felt at ease in the United States, that year Iwańska moved to London, where she began a period of intense literary creation. In 1989, she was honored with the knight's cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996, she wrote her final memoir about the British health care system. Because her scientific work was written in English and her literary output was written in Polish, her legacy suffered from compartmentalization. Recent scholarship has sought to examine both aspects of her career and recover her contributions to anthropology as well as her literature. Provided by Wikipedia