Speakers

Jon Fox is a sociologist at the University of Bristol with longstanding interests in everyday nationalism. Throughout his career, he has tried to understand the significance of nationalism for people in their everyday lives. On the one hand, he’s looked into how nationalism resonates with regular people. For Jon, it’s their indifference and apathy that he finds most intriguing. Jon has spent most of his career, on the other hand, researching how these same people are agents of everyday nationalism in their own right. He’s shown how people are everyday users of nationalism in ways that don’t always follow from nationalism’s more stylised political variants but rather align with the more personal contingencies of people’s everyday lives.

Jon developed this approach in a monograph he co-authored with Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, and Liana Grancea called Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (2007). He and Cynthia Miller-Idriss then distilled insights from their research in this area into their ‘Everyday Nationhood’ article (Ethnicities, 2008). He has developed these ideas in new and different ways since then, culminating in a 2025 article in Nations & Nationalism called ‘Clapping the Nation, or, From a Global Pandemic to National Imaginaries via Local Solidarities’ and a more recent refresh of the Everyday Nationhood agenda – with Cynthia Miller-Idriss again – called ‘From Everyday Nationhood to Everyday Nationalism’ (Nationalities Papers, 2026).

Geneviève Zubrzycki is William H. Sewell Jr. Collegiate Professor of Sociology and the Weiser Family Professor for European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. A historical and cultural sociologist, she has published widely on nationalism and religion; collective memory, national mythology and the politics of commemoration; and visual culture and materiality. She’s the author of the award-winning books The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago 2006, Polish trans. 2016), Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (Chicago 2016, French trans. 2020), and Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton 2022, Polish trans. 2026). That latest book was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences.

A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the Bronislaw Malinowski Prize in the Social Sciences from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, she has held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Science Po Paris, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Leibniz Institute/ University of Regensburg.

She is currently at work on a book on the aesthetics of nationalism.