CEERES of Voices interview with Michał Murawski: The Palace Complex

Please enjoy our latest CEERES of Voices author interview!

Meghanne Barker (University of Chicago) interviews Michał Murawski (University College London) about his new book, “The Palace Complex.”

The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was ‘gifted’ to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Locals joke that their city suffers from a ‘Palace of Culture complex.’ In his book, Michał Murawski traces the skyscraper’s powerful impact on twenty-first-century Warsaw; on its architectural and urban landscape; on its political, ideological, and cultural lives; and on the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. The Palace Complex explores the many factors that allow Warsaw’s Palace to endure as a still-socialist building in a post-socialist city.

Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and art based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where he is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies.

Meghanne Barker is a linguistic anthropologist whose research examines intersections of play, performance, media, and politics in postsocialist Kazakhstan and Southeast Europe.