Geographical Imaginaries of America: Biographical Experience, Migration, and the Habitus of Polish Intellectuals across Three Centuries

Florian Znaniecki and William Thomas remain two of the most prominent figures in the development of Polish social thought. In their collaboration on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, they pioneered the use of personal documents, such as diaries, as a sociological research method. This approach has since become a hallmark of the Polish qualitative research tradition, particularly in studies of migration and social change.

While the image of the West in the diaries of the working class has been well-studied, there is a notable gap in understanding how it is perceived by the Polish elite, particularly the migrating intelligentsia, including academics, writers, and diplomats. Our project, Biography & Academic Imaginary: Polish Intellectual Diaspora in the Autobiographies of Migrant Scholars, seeks to address this gap by collecting and analyzing the diaries and biographical narratives of Polish intellectuals. The aim is to explore their geographic imaginaries of the West and how these perceptions are confronted by reality.

In our presentation, we will compare the images of America as perceived by Polish intellectuals at three pivotal moments in time: in Letters from a Journey to America by Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz at the end of the 19th century; in Skyscrapers and Dumpster by Aleksander Szczepański, PhD in economics and Polish Consul General in Chicago from 1929 to 1930; and in the works of contemporary academics who migrated to the U.S. between 1970 and 2004. Our aim is to conduct a comparative analysis of these three representations within the context of the memoirs of intellectuals and their geographical imaginaries. Following Znaniecki's method, we will examine how specific preconceptions influenced the migration trajectories of Polish intellectuals in America and how their mobility experiences shaped these imaginaries.