Anna Grutza is a PhD Candidate in Comparative History at CEU. 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 on “Imperial Laboratories of Governance in Disguise: Seeing Through the Grid of Cold War Information Analysis”, she focuses on Cold War truth regimes, questions of epistemology, subjectivity and objectivity in relation to the work of Radio Free Europe. She investigates how Cold War information analysis dealt with error, ignorance and unreliability by tracing the term ‘paranoia’ as an epistemic criterion, its ways of shaping possibilities of knowledge, and its feedback processes upon scientific and political discourses.
Grutza works on the intersection between the history of Cold War social sciences and that of everyday life. She regards the problematic of ‘paranoia’ as being indicative of a particular Cold War irrationality.