Anna Müller
Biographic Data
| ID | 3675859 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anna Müller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anna |
| FAMILY NAME | Müller |
| SIGNATURE | MULLER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan–Dearborn |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3120-8560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A comparative analysis of the cost of alternative approaches to addressing housing need in Namibia
Despite considerable housing deficits, particularly in Africa, and the prioritization of housing agendas by many governments, there is relatively little research on the most cost-effective approaches to use. This paper provides a comparative analysis of four programmes addressing the housing needs of the residents of one Namibian town. The analysis informs our understanding of the most cost-effective and affordable ways to reach the town’s low-in…
Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain
The colorful cover of Malgorzata Fidelis's Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland entices the reader into a fascinating world of Polish youth of the long 1960s. The photo depicts two young women dressed in fashionable clothing holding flowers and posing in front of the Pałac Kultury (Palace of Culture) in Warsaw. They look joyous and optimistic, suggesting that Polish youth was forward looking, re…
Wheels of Change
Wheels of Change: Feminist Transgressions in Polish Culture and Society is a volume that brings together a select group of Polish historians and literary specialists to explore examples of Polish women's transgressions, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through to the present. The book emerged from discussions sparked by the 2017 ASEEES panel titled “Feminist Transgression in Polish Culture.” The concept of transgression serves a…
Communist Poland
Communist Poland: A Jewish Woman's Experience is an annotated memoir by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, a Polish Jewish woman who, as the editors of the book state in the introduction, in just a few years, went “from a prisoner of Auschwitz to one of the most powerful female journalists in Poland” (p. 1). The memoir under discussion is her last book and covers the author's life from the moment of her liberation from a camp in Germany in 1945 to her decisio…
The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942–2015
The Holocaust Bystander in Polish Culture, 1942–2015: The Story of Innocence stems from a seminar that had gathered literary scholars at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 2013 to 2017 to debate the “indifferent witness to the Holocaust” (p. v).1 The book has an introduction and seven chapters written by literature specialists Katarzyna Chmielewska, Tomasz Żukowski, Aránzazu Calderón Puerta, and Anna Zawadzk…
Transgression, Struggle, and Scandal
This article analyzes the lives of a handful of women, who, after years of involvement in various military conflicts (from World War I to World War II), were sentenced to long prison sentences. Particularly, it explores the lives of Anna Neuman, Irena Tomalakwa, Elżbieta Zawacka, and Emilia Malessa from the perspective of the concept “postawa” which most of them acquired in the early years of their life while soldiering (postawa as a concept rela…
Comics and Nation
One item on display in the section of concentration camps at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland, is a nativity scene created by a group of Polish women confined in the Ravensbrück camp. Next to the traditional nativity figures are a series of Disney characters. At first, the juxtaposition of these figures seems puzzling, but with a deeper understanding of Polish culture historically, it becomes clear that children and adults of …
Assessing Combined Longitudinal Mentorship and Skills Training on Select Maternal and Neonatal Outcomes in Rural and Urban Health Facilities in Malawi
INTRODUCTION: Despite successful efforts to improve clinical access and skilled birth attendance in Malawi, it still faces high rates of maternal and neonatal mortality. In 2017, the UCSF-GAIN partnership began a nurse-midwifery clinical education and longitudinal mentorship program. While it has received positive reviews, it is unclear whether routinely collected indicators can assess such a program's impact. METHOD: A longitudinal review of the…
The People of Hamtramck
This article presents a selective portrayal of the Polish Americans of Hamtramck based on a collection of oral interviews conducted in the summers of 2014 and 2015. It argues that Hamtramck is best understood through the concept of “tangible belonging,” which historian John Swanson defines as an identity that is built in connection with a mental construct derived from the tactile environment in which an individual lives and experiences through th…
Gender, Pleasure, and Violence
Poles of certain generations undeniably remember the popularity that Sztuka kochania [The art of love] by Michalina Wisłocka enjoyed. Between 1978 and 1995, the book had three editions and supposedly sold seven million copies.1 As Agnieszka Kościańska, an anthropologist and scholar of Polish sexual discourse, claims, this number is most likely slightly inflated, but it does not diminish the book's incredible popularity. In 2017, Poles, especially…
Tancerka i Zagłada. Historia Poli Nireńskiej [The dancer and the Holocaust. The history of Pola Nireńska]
The Polish American Historical Association in the Twenty-First Century
Research Article| October 01 2021 The Polish American Historical Association in the Twenty-First Century Anna Müller Anna Müller Anna Müller is an associate professor and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author of If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland. From 2010–13…
Husbands Who Do Not Beat,” or on Gender and Sexuality in Polish American Studies
Neighbors and Ghosts
This essay argues for the centrality of Polish-Jewish relations for Polish history. I look at a handful of texts (including history and literature) that show the continued nature of autobiographical elements in the exploration of the Polish and Jewish past and the violence that defined it. The conversations about a difficult past play a crucial role not only in the process of understanding the impact/importance of the past for the present, but th…
Co-producing land for housing through informal settlement upgrading
This paper summarizes the informal settlement upgrading processes in the Namibian municipality of Gobabis, which are arguably the most accomplished bottom-up developments in the country so far. As these processes were made possible through a broad coalition of partners, we employ the lens of co-production and engage with the more recent literature on it, which focuses on questions of equity and empowerment. We note how co-production achieves more…
Eastern Europe Unmapped
Prawa człowieka w polityce demokracji zachodnich wobec Polski w latach 1975–1981
Child Survivors of the Holocaust
The Return
In this article, while focusing on non-Jewish female prisoners who returned to Poland soon after the war, I examine the place of female support and friendship in the years immediately following the Second World War. It is based on a collection of letters that Joanna Muszkowska Penson and a group of her friends began exchanging soon after their departure from Ravensbrück, in the span of seven months from May to December 1945. Oral interviews with …
Russian History Through the Senses
Emergency drills for agricultural drought response
Drills are an important element of disaster management, helping to increase preparedness and reduce the risk of real‐time failure. Yet, they are not applied systematically to slow‐onset disasters such as a drought, which causes damage that is not instantly apparent and thus does not solicit immediate action. This case study evaluates how drills inform institutional responses to slow‐onset disasters. It spotlights Guatemala, a country where drough…
If the Walls Could Speak
This book is a collective history about imprisoned women in post-1945 Poland. It focuses on how these women adapted to confinement and remade their lives in a prison cell through words during interrogations; through their senses, by which they oriented themselves in the prison’s spatial organization and created a feeling of security; and through their physicality as a confirmation of their gender identity and a means of exerting pressure on autho…
Prison Relationships
This chapter concentrates on prison friendships. It begins with an exploration of possibilities for creating new relationships as well as maintaining contact through a wall. Wall relationships helped prisoners extend beyond their own cell and gave them a chance to recreate themselves and some of the social roles that they lost when they entered prison. This chapter tells the story of life in both interrogation cells and cells where women were to …
Conclusion
The conclusion returns to some of the questions asked throughout the book while highlighting the major points of the book. In addition, it also focuses on women’s attitudes toward Communism and their post-prison evaluation of their imprisonment. Did the years in prison contribute to sentiments of anti-Communism or did they make them into Communists? In other words, was political imprisonment a school of political resistance? Or was it a school of…
On the Threshold
This chapter is devoted to the imbalanced power relations between the interrogator and interrogated. Reading interrogation transcripts in detail, this chapter stays as close as possible to the drama that unfolded in an interrogation room. The physical and verbal violence that arrested prisoners encountered during interrogations was devastating. But the power that was bent on crushing them also left room for creation, which the women ingeniously t…
Eastern Europe Unmapped
Participatory enumerations at the national level in Namibia
This paper describes how the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia developed the capacity to undertake enumerations and mapping of informal settlements and, with support from the national government and a local NGO, developed the Community Land Information Programme. Through this initiative, the federation has profiled and mapped all of the informal settlements in Namibia, covering more than 500,000 people without secure land tenure and setting a …
Securing inclusion
This study draws together the experiences of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) in using finance to secure access to land and infrastructure. Thefederation uses strategies of collective solidarity, political presence and financial capacity to encourage local authorities to reconsider traditional approaches to urban development, and to date they have assisted about 5 per cent of urban dwellers in need in Namibia with housing improveme…
Windhoek, Namibia
Windhoek is the capital city of Namibia with a population of 223,000, 26 per cent of whom are living in informal settlements. Despite this scale of need, experiences in the last decade have demonstrated to the urban poor, city officials and politicians that it is possible to secure improvements. Windhoek's new Policy for Access to Land and Housing is now being promoted by a network of NGOs and grassroots organisations throughout southern Africa. …
Windhoek, Namibia
Windhoek is the capital city of Namibia with a population of 223,000, 26 per cent of whom are living in informal settlements. Despite this scale of need, experiences in the last decade have demonstrated to the urban poor, city officials and politicians that it is possible to secure improvements. Windhoek's new Policy for Access to Land and Housing is now being promoted by a network of NGOs and grassroots organisations throughout southern Africa. …
Securing inclusion
This study draws together the experiences of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) in using finance to secure access to land and infrastructure. Thefederation uses strategies of collective solidarity, political presence and financial capacity to encourage local authorities to reconsider traditional approaches to urban development, and to date they have assisted about 5 per cent of urban dwellers in need in Namibia with housing improveme…
Participatory enumerations at the national level in Namibia
This paper describes how the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia developed the capacity to undertake enumerations and mapping of informal settlements and, with support from the national government and a local NGO, developed the Community Land Information Programme. Through this initiative, the federation has profiled and mapped all of the informal settlements in Namibia, covering more than 500,000 people without secure land tenure and setting a …
A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps
Many of us—historians, sociologists, and writers—have been touched by extraordinary people whose lives we feel compelled to document. Yet we are often hesitant to embark on projects that are deeply...
If the Walls Could Speak
This book is a collective history about imprisoned women in post-1945 Poland. It focuses on how these women adapted to confinement and remade their lives in a prison cell through words during interrogations; through their senses, by which they oriented themselves in the prison’s spatial organization and created a feeling of security; and through their physicality as a confirmation of their gender identity and a means of exerting pressure on autho…
Prison Relationships
This chapter concentrates on prison friendships. It begins with an exploration of possibilities for creating new relationships as well as maintaining contact through a wall. Wall relationships helped prisoners extend beyond their own cell and gave them a chance to recreate themselves and some of the social roles that they lost when they entered prison. This chapter tells the story of life in both interrogation cells and cells where women were to …
Conclusion
The conclusion returns to some of the questions asked throughout the book while highlighting the major points of the book. In addition, it also focuses on women’s attitudes toward Communism and their post-prison evaluation of their imprisonment. Did the years in prison contribute to sentiments of anti-Communism or did they make them into Communists? In other words, was political imprisonment a school of political resistance? Or was it a school of…
On the Threshold
This chapter is devoted to the imbalanced power relations between the interrogator and interrogated. Reading interrogation transcripts in detail, this chapter stays as close as possible to the drama that unfolded in an interrogation room. The physical and verbal violence that arrested prisoners encountered during interrogations was devastating. But the power that was bent on crushing them also left room for creation, which the women ingeniously t…
Boredom and Emptiness, or the Flow of Life in Confinement
The last chapter focuses on daily prison life. It starts in interrogation rooms and moves to prison cells. Women prisoners undertook various activities to distract themselves from the idleness of their world. They spent their days learning, reading, and engaging in their own cultural activities. As they recreated their lives in prison, they chose traditionally female roles of sharing, providing for, and taking care of their cellmates. These new c…
War, Dialogue, and Overcoming the Past
Research Article| August 01 2017 War, Dialogue, and Overcoming the Past: The Second World War Museum in Gdańsk, Poland Anna Muller, Anna Muller Anna Muller is assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. From 2010 to 2013, she worked a curator at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland. Her book on the life of women in prison cells in postwar Poland, titled If the Walls Could Speak, will appear in October 20…
In the Unlikeliest of Places
Russian History Through the Senses
Emergency drills for agricultural drought response
Drills are an important element of disaster management, helping to increase preparedness and reduce the risk of real‐time failure. Yet, they are not applied systematically to slow‐onset disasters such as a drought, which causes damage that is not instantly apparent and thus does not solicit immediate action. This case study evaluates how drills inform institutional responses to slow‐onset disasters. It spotlights Guatemala, a country where drough…
Co-producing land for housing through informal settlement upgrading
This paper summarizes the informal settlement upgrading processes in the Namibian municipality of Gobabis, which are arguably the most accomplished bottom-up developments in the country so far. As these processes were made possible through a broad coalition of partners, we employ the lens of co-production and engage with the more recent literature on it, which focuses on questions of equity and empowerment. We note how co-production achieves more…
Eastern Europe Unmapped
Prawa człowieka w polityce demokracji zachodnich wobec Polski w latach 1975–1981
Child Survivors of the Holocaust
The Return
In this article, while focusing on non-Jewish female prisoners who returned to Poland soon after the war, I examine the place of female support and friendship in the years immediately following the Second World War. It is based on a collection of letters that Joanna Muszkowska Penson and a group of her friends began exchanging soon after their departure from Ravensbrück, in the span of seven months from May to December 1945. Oral interviews with …
Tancerka i Zagłada. Historia Poli Nireńskiej [The dancer and the Holocaust. The history of Pola Nireńska]
The Polish American Historical Association in the Twenty-First Century
Research Article| October 01 2021 The Polish American Historical Association in the Twenty-First Century Anna Müller Anna Müller Anna Müller is an associate professor and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author of If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland. From 2010–13…
Husbands Who Do Not Beat,” or on Gender and Sexuality in Polish American Studies
Neighbors and Ghosts
This essay argues for the centrality of Polish-Jewish relations for Polish history. I look at a handful of texts (including history and literature) that show the continued nature of autobiographical elements in the exploration of the Polish and Jewish past and the violence that defined it. The conversations about a difficult past play a crucial role not only in the process of understanding the impact/importance of the past for the present, but th…
Assessing Combined Longitudinal Mentorship and Skills Training on Select Maternal and Neonatal Outcomes in Rural and Urban Health Facilities in Malawi
INTRODUCTION: Despite successful efforts to improve clinical access and skilled birth attendance in Malawi, it still faces high rates of maternal and neonatal mortality. In 2017, the UCSF-GAIN partnership began a nurse-midwifery clinical education and longitudinal mentorship program. While it has received positive reviews, it is unclear whether routinely collected indicators can assess such a program's impact. METHOD: A longitudinal review of the…
The People of Hamtramck
This article presents a selective portrayal of the Polish Americans of Hamtramck based on a collection of oral interviews conducted in the summers of 2014 and 2015. It argues that Hamtramck is best understood through the concept of “tangible belonging,” which historian John Swanson defines as an identity that is built in connection with a mental construct derived from the tactile environment in which an individual lives and experiences through th…
Gender, Pleasure, and Violence
Poles of certain generations undeniably remember the popularity that Sztuka kochania [The art of love] by Michalina Wisłocka enjoyed. Between 1978 and 1995, the book had three editions and supposedly sold seven million copies.1 As Agnieszka Kościańska, an anthropologist and scholar of Polish sexual discourse, claims, this number is most likely slightly inflated, but it does not diminish the book's incredible popularity. In 2017, Poles, especially…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (15 works) · History (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies (8 works) · Geography (7 works)