Anna Grutza

Anna Grutza is a PhD Candidate in Comparative History at the Central European University in Budapest / Vienna. She holds an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the Bauhaus-University Weimar (Germany) and an MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe (Poland).

In her dissertation, she focuses on Cold War truth regimes, questions of epistemology, and subjectivity as well as objectivity in relation to the work of the US-American broadcaster Radio Free Europe (RFE) and its Research Institute. While being critical of the employment of the term ‘paranoia’ by US social scientists, she analyses the term as an epistemic criterion and organizing concept, its ways of shaping possibilities of knowledge and its feedback processes upon Cold War scientific and political discourses. Against these discourses, she approaches the everyday life of Polish citizens who were correspondents and listeners of Western radio stations like RFE and tries to identify the early use of punitive medicine / psychiatric diagnoses against regime opponents by the Polish secret services in the postwar years.

In general, she works on the intersection between the history of Cold War social sciences, the history of everyday life and the history of emotions. She regards the problematic of ‘paranoia’ as being indicative of a particular Cold War irrationality.