Barbara Milewski received her PhD from the Music Department of Princeton University. A Polish music specialist, she has lectured extensively on questions of national identity and memory in the music of Chopin; songs created in the Nazi concentration camps; and the music of Poland's iconic postwar film, Zakazane piosenki  (Forbidden Songs, 1947), for which she created the complete English subtitles for the original uncensored version of the film. Her scholarship has appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, reference works and in scholarly volumes on postwar musical commemoration. With Bret Werb she produced an annotated compact disc of archival recordings by Aleksander Kulisiewicz, Ballads and Broadsides: Songs from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1940-1945. Her translations have brought wider attention to the remarkable repertoire of Polish topical songs created in the Nazi camps. She has been interviewed for Radio France’s France Culture (2023) two-part documentary “The Bard of the Underworld” (2023) and Le Monde’s six-part story on Kulisiewicz in August 2021. She also served as consultant and interviewee for two BBC The Documentary podcasts: “Songs from the Depths of Hell” (2019) and “Songs from Auschwitz” (2025).

Her work has been generously supported by fellowships and prizes awarded by NEH, Fulbright, the American Musicological Society, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and the Kosciuszko Foundation. She is also the recipient of two distinguished teaching awards. In 2015, a prestigious Pew Center for Arts and Heritage Grant funded collaboration with Theater scholar Allen Kuharski to bring Michał Zadara’s acclaimed work, Chopin Without Piano, to Swarthmore, Philadelphia and Boston for its North American premiere. In 2023 she was awarded the Aquila Polonica Prize for the best article in English on any aspect of Polish Studies by the Polish Studies Association. In 2023-24, she was honored to be the Joyce and Arthur Schechter Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM.

​​​She is completing a book-length study that explores the music making of prisoners in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau. You can find Milewski’s CV and published work at Academia.edu.