Agata Joanna Lagiewka, the Wirth Institute's Austrian Research Fellow in 2014-2015, recently returned from a research trip in Australia where she presented a paper on her PhD thesis on hybrid identities in autofictional literature at the German Studies Association of Australia (GSAA) Conference "The Foreign and the Self in German literature, society and culture" at the University of Sydney in November.
In December Ms. Lagiewka visited Melbourne and the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre to interview Mrs. Maria Lewitt (author of Come Spring: an autobiographical novel and No Snow in December: an autobiographical novel) on autobiographical writing for her research project. Mrs. Lewitt is a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor. She and her family lived in hiding in Warsaw, Poland, through the Holocaust and World War II. They survived outside the camps and ghettos, living on the run in the Polish countryside.