SUNY Cortland sophomore featured at 2025 international seminar

07/21/2025

Katrina Ludwikowski grew up exploring museums and historical sites in America and Europe with her mother, a former schoolteacher in Poland, and her father, a World War II history buff.

“Every family vacation was a history one,” Ludwikowski said.

Already the SUNY Cortland sophomore history major and anthropology minor has given a virtual poster presentation at an international seminar in Tokyo, Japan.

Ludwikowski presented “Civil War Statues, Cultural Heritage or the Manifestation of False History?” on June 14 during the 2025 International Seminar on Heritage Interpretation and Presentation for Future Generations.

“Hers was one of only seven poster abstracts that were accepted from so many around the world, and she was the only undergraduate to present a poster,” said her mentor, Bekeh Ukelina, a professor in the university’s Africana studies and history departments and director of the university’s Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies. A total of 120 scholars applied, he noted.

“The only other time we had an undergraduate student participate in this seminar, it was last year in London,” Ukelina said. “Generally, it’s all graduate students.”

While Ludwikowski logged on virtually from her home in Syosset, N.Y., Ukelina attended the seminar at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, where he took part in a panel discussion and later was available to answer audience questions about Ludwikowski’s work.

Ludwikowski’s poster, during sessions on “Voices of Future Generations on Contested Heritage — Pathways to Peacebuilding and Reconciliation,” accompanied those of six other presenters from around the world, including three doctoral degree candidates, two master’s degree candidates and one independent researcher.

Ukelina, who had observed Ludwikowski’s capabilities in his HIS 200: Historical Methods course, noted that Ludwikowski’s participation resulted from an encounter last spring with two other seminar speakers who visited SUNY Cortland to discuss “Contested Heritage: Japan, Korea, China and the Struggle for Historical Narratives at UNESCO.” Hyunjae Kim is a professor of heritage studies at University of Cambridge and Huzeima Mahamadu is a doctoral student in arts and social sciences at Australian National University.

“She asked them a question and then approached me with another friend and spoke with me about UNESCO Cultural Heritage projects,” Ukelina said. “We stayed in touch throughout the class.”

“She was pretty confident about the work she undertook, and 90% of the work she did herself,” Ukelina said. “What I saw was very special. It was a very competitive poster.”

“(Ukelina) is the one who gave me the idea to look at the (American) Civil War, as the seminar was not only about heritage but also about peacebuilding and how the new generation can help in this aspect,” Ludwikowski said. “For example, the seminar was in Japan so in the first part they talked about conflict in postwar Korea and Japan and how they can offer resolutions to improve the relationship between these countries.

“This led me to talk about how the newer generation can help change the narrative of the Civil War, especially in the South.”

Ludwikowski’s poster shared scholarship about how today’s youth have been raised with more information and far less tendency to accept the carefully constructed myth of the “noble lost cause” in American history, which started circulating in textbooks and newly erected public statues some 25 to 30 years after the war itself was over.

“My poster was about how these statues have led to people thinking the confederacy was part of southern culture itself, like their heritage,” Ludwikowski said. Meanwhile Black Americans of the era lacked the education and opportunity to push back on the false history.

“A week after this conference, I heard someone say, ‘Oh, yeah, the South didn’t really do anything wrong.’ It’s still deeply embedded in the Southern curriculum and the Southern culture now. I say, ‘Oh, my generation is working on it.’ But it’s still there.”

“The monument theme is a very important theme as there is a grant from UNESCO working on American monuments right now,” Ukelina said.

As a child, Ludwikowski visited art galleries and historical sites in Poland and England with her parents.

“The city of Kraków is like a museum itself as the Jewish ghettos are still there, both for World War II and the medieval era, as well as old medieval-era towns underneath the city and medieval castles in the city itself,” Ludwikowski said. “While visiting my mom’s village, I actually stayed in her childhood home, the same house where three Nazi soldiers once lived with my grandmother.”

She also experienced her father’s chosen sites such as the WW II-era British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s bunker in England.

“I was more interested in the human side of the war, so social policy and things relating to how the ‘non-Aryan’ were treated by the Germans were more up my alley,” Ludwikowski said. “For example, with rationing, while the common folk had to abide by government regulation — milk only going out to those below the age of 5, limited amount of meat in circulation — those with money were often able to get around it through the black market or being able to go to restaurants more frequently.”

Since enrolling at Cortland, Ludwikowski has found her primary interest is studying the cultural connections established between Medieval Europe and certain Asian and African countries amid a golden age.

That natural curiosity, along with her virtual poster presentation experience this summer, point to a bright future.

“She’s an up-and-coming scholar,” Ukelina said. “I would be surprised if she didn’t get a Ph.D. in the future. She has an analytical mind and is a very serious scholar.”

Select an image below to begin a slide show