Karolina Siewak is a PhD candidate in history at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History (Polish Academy of Sciences) and the Anthropos Doctoral School. Her research interests include the history of rural women and gender history in post-war Poland.
She graduated in history from the University of Warsaw in 2022. Her M.A. thesis was devoted to the visual representation of countryside life in the state press of socialist Poland during the 1970s, including photographs of rural women taken by female photographer Grażyna Rutowska. Her doctoral project explores feminist knowledge production in the context of shifting social-cultural roles of rural women in state-socialist Poland.
In 2020, she published an article in Myśl Ludowa about the socio-educational activities of female members of the rural youth organization in Poland, Związek Młodzieży Wiejskiej, between 1957 and 1970. There, she emphasized the significant efforts of rural girls to secure a new social role for women within rural communities.