Knowledge Geopolitics and the University
Overview
Knowledge does not circulate in a politically or institutionally neutral space. It moves through languages, infrastructures, funding systems, professional networks and organisations that distribute visibility, authority and opportunity unevenly. Nor is knowledge simply produced and transferred. It is also preserved, reinterpreted and sedimented in disciplines, archives, museums, anniversaries and public memory. Universities are central to all these processes: they create knowledge, authorise expertise and help determine which intellectual traditions become universal and which remain classified as local or peripheral.
My earlier research examined the formation of research schools, the informal environments of intellectual work and the movement of scholars, concepts and practices between Central and Eastern Europe and major academic centres. It challenged the assumption that knowledge transfer proceeds in one direction, from established centres towards passive peripheries. Migrants, multilingual scholars and semi-peripheral institutions reshape disciplines and transform the environments into which they enter. My work on Copernicus extends this perspective by examining how scientific and historical knowledge accumulates over time and how academic institutions, museums, cities and commemorative practices continually reconstruct the authority of the past.
My current work develops these questions within the geopolitics of contemporary research. Scientific openness now operates alongside technological competition, war, economic security and growing concern about dual-use research. Research security is necessary, but its costs and institutional requirements are distributed unevenly. Without shared capacity, new security obligations may deepen the divide between universities able to manage risk intelligently and those pushed towards defensive compliance or withdrawal from international cooperation.
I therefore study the university both as an object of research and as an institution that must be actively redesigned. My academic leadership provides a practical setting in which ideas about distributed excellence, institutional capacity, researcher formation, responsible openness and knowledge resilience can be tested.
Projects and Current Work
Knowledge Geopolitics, Research Security and Open Science
2024–present · Research and policy programme
This programme examines how geopolitical conflict, technological competition and security policy are changing the conditions under which universities produce and exchange knowledge.
Research security is often approached primarily through risk: foreign interference, cyberattacks, export controls, data protection, dual-use technologies and the potential misuse of research. These threats are real, but a risk-centred approach remains incomplete. Security also concerns the capacity of researchers and institutions to continue their work during war, political disruption or attacks on research infrastructure.
My work focuses on the relationship between security and openness. Protecting knowledge should not lead to the indiscriminate closure of science or the exclusion of researchers on the basis of nationality. Universities need proportionate, risk-informed systems that protect people, data and strategic technologies while preserving academic freedom and responsible international cooperation.
A second problem is institutional inequality. Research security requires specialised personnel, legal knowledge, partner assessment, data governance, cyber capacity and sustained leadership attention. Strong universities can integrate these responsibilities into professional structures. Underfunded institutions may receive the same obligations without the resources needed to fulfil them. Research security must therefore be developed as a shared public capacity rather than transferred to universities as another unfunded mandate.
Research University Transformation and Distributed Excellence
2024–present · Institutional research and policy programme
This strand examines how universities outside Europe’s most established metropolitan centres can develop internationally competitive research without reproducing the opposition between excellence and cohesion.
The concept of distributed excellence rejects two inadequate models. The first assumes that Europe can become competitive only by concentrating resources in a small number of historically dominant institutions. The second attempts to correct geographical inequalities by dispersing resources without sufficient attention to research quality and accumulated capacity.
Distributed excellence instead means creating the institutional conditions in which high-quality research can emerge in more places. These conditions include stable teams, professional research support, doctoral education, shared infrastructure, international partnerships, mentoring and the ability to invest before external project funding arrives.
This work draws on my experience as Vice-Rector for Research at Nicolaus Copernicus University, my involvement in Poland’s Excellence Initiative – Research University programme and my work within the Young European Research Universities Network. It connects institutional transformation with wider questions about the geography of European research, the future of Horizon Europe and the relationship between project funding, core funding and long-term capacity building.
IMSErt: Building an Interdisciplinary Research Environment
2019–2024 · Founder and Director · Nicolaus Copernicus University
IMSErt — Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments — was established as an interdisciplinary University Centre of Excellence bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Its development was an institutional experiment in creating conditions for research that did not fit established departmental divisions. The Centre combined international recruitment, postdoctoral positions, visiting researchers, research support and collaboration across disciplines. It also developed an Urban Lab connecting academic research with the city and regional community.
Directing IMSErt made it possible to examine how interdisciplinary research environments are built in practice. Formal structures and funding are necessary, but insufficient. Successful collaboration also depends on trust, informal exchange, administrative competence and the ability to create a shared institutional identity among researchers working with different methods and intellectual traditions.
Multidirectional Knowledge Transfer from Eastern and Central Europe
2021–2022 · Principal Investigator · NAWA Bekker Programme · Institute for Advanced Study, University of Amsterdam
This project investigated the movement of knowledge from and through Central and Eastern Europe between 1918 and 1968.
Historical accounts frequently describe the region as a recipient of modern theories, methods and institutional models developed elsewhere. The project reversed this perspective. It examined how scholars from Central and Eastern Europe transported concepts, professional practices and intellectual traditions into Western European and North American institutions.
The project also questioned the limitations of case-based intellectual history. Knowledge transfer is produced through multiple interacting variables: migration, language, institutions, personal networks, funding, political disruption and access to archives. During my residency at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Advanced Study, I explored whether approaches derived from complexity science could help model these multidirectional relations without reducing them to linear narratives of influence.
Watch the project presentation
Translingualism in Knowledge Transfer: The Case of Polish Intellectuals in the United States
2018–2019 · Principal Investigator · National Science Centre, Poland
This project examined how migration between languages shaped the transfer and production of knowledge.
Its central cases were Polish intellectuals and researchers who worked in the United States. Moving into English-language academic environments did not involve simply translating ideas developed in Poland. It required intellectuals to reorganise their arguments, adapt disciplinary vocabularies and renegotiate their professional identities.
Translingualism was therefore treated not as a linguistic complication added to knowledge transfer, but as one of its constitutive mechanisms. Changing language can alter a concept’s meaning, audience and disciplinary location. It can make knowledge more internationally mobile, but it can also detach ideas from their original intellectual genealogies.
The project included archival research on the Polish-American virologist and oncologist Ludwik Gross and on the informal networks through which scientific knowledge, professional support and institutional opportunities circulated.
Informal Knowledge Transfer and Academic Environments
2016–2019 · Visiting Scholar · Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago
This research examined the informal dimensions of knowledge production.
Academic institutions are commonly described through their formal structures: departments, laboratories, grants, publications and employment hierarchies. Yet intellectual work also depends on conversations, mentorship, friendship, hospitality and encounters that take place outside official programmes. Cafés, corridors, private homes and shared meals can become important infrastructures of academic life.
The project investigated how these informal environments shape collaboration and intellectual mobility. It also considered their unequal accessibility. Informal networks can enable creativity and trust, but they can also reproduce exclusion by favouring those who already possess cultural confidence, institutional proximity and access to influential communities.
Edited Volume
Nicolaus Copernicus in the Culture of Memory: Sedimentation of Knowledge
Edited with Wojciech Piasek. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, 2025, 301 pp. Geschichte im mitteleuropäischen Kontext, vol. 8. Published in English and available open access.
The volume examines how knowledge about Nicolaus Copernicus has been created, transformed and preserved from the early modern period to the commemorations marking the 550th anniversary of his birth in 2023.
Copernicus is approached not only as a historical astronomer, but also as an object of continually changing knowledge. Successive generations of scholars, political institutions, museums, cities and cultural organisations have interpreted his life and work through their own intellectual frameworks and public needs. Scientific knowledge, historical scholarship and cultural memory therefore do not develop separately. They accumulate, interact and reshape one another.
The concept of sedimentation of knowledge describes this process. New interpretations do not simply replace earlier ones. They are deposited over time, creating layered images of Copernicus as an astronomer, national figure, European scholar, local citizen and symbol of scientific modernity.
The volume brings together the history of science, intellectual history, memory studies, cultural history and the study of public commemoration. It demonstrates how academic disciplines and public institutions jointly determine which forms of knowledge become authoritative and how historical figures are mobilised within changing political and cultural environments.
Read or download the open-access volume
Ethical and Moral Aspects of “Humanities Practices”
Polish title: Etyczno-moralne aspekty „praktyk humanistycznych”. Edited with Marcin Kafar. Toruń and Łódź: International Center for Information Management Systems and Services, 2015, 254 pp. Published in Polish.
The volume examines the ethical dimensions of research in the humanities and social sciences.
Its point of departure is that academic practice is never ethically neutral. Researchers make decisions about representation, privacy, interpretation, fieldwork, authorship and the use of personal testimony. These choices cannot be reduced to formal compliance or research-ethics procedures because they concern the relationships through which knowledge is produced.
The volume brings together theoretical reflection, case studies and a collective discussion about contemporary academic practices. It treats ethics not as an external restriction imposed on research, but as part of scholarly responsibility and methodological self-awareness.
Selected Articles and Chapters
“On the Benefits of a Sociology of Public Intellectuals for Modern Intellectual History”
Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 2, 2018, pp. 607–619.
The article argues that intellectual history should analyse not only ideas, but also the social and institutional conditions under which intellectual authority is produced.
Public intellectuals operate simultaneously within academic disciplines, media environments, political debates and professional networks. Their influence cannot be explained solely through the internal coherence of their ideas. It also depends on institutions, audiences, reputation and access to channels of communication.
The article proposes a closer relationship between intellectual history and sociology. This makes it possible to study how intellectual roles change when scholars migrate between political systems, languages and academic environments.
“The Effect of Synergy: The Cultural (Pre)History of Modern Polish Literary Theory in the Central and Eastern European Context”
German title: “Der Effekt der Synergie des Eigenen. Die kulturelle (Vor-)Geschichte der modernen polnischen Literaturtheorie im mittel- und osteuropäischen Kontext.” Die Welt der Slaven 61, no. 2, 2016, pp. 258–279. Published in German.
The article reconstructs the formation of modern Polish literary theory through exchanges among linguistics, philosophy, biology and literary studies in Central and Eastern Europe.
It challenges retrospective narratives that organise intellectual history around autonomous national traditions or singular founding figures. Research schools emerge through the interaction of people, concepts, institutions and disciplinary languages. Their originality is often the effect of combining elements drawn from different intellectual environments.
The article therefore treats theoretical innovation as a relational and institutional process rather than the isolated achievement of individual scholars.
“From Circles to the School (and Back Again): The Case of Polish Structuralism”
With Dorota Ulicka. In Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities: Literary Theory, History, Philosophy, edited by Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere. New York and London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 63–83.
The chapter examines how informal intellectual circles become recognised academic schools.
Using Polish structuralism as its principal case, it shows that scholarly formations develop through a combination of concepts, personal relations, institutional support, teaching, translation and retrospective acts of classification. A research school is not created by theory alone. It requires social mechanisms through which knowledge is transmitted and an intellectual genealogy is constructed.
The chapter also demonstrates that the distinction between an informal circle and a formal school is reversible. Institutionalisation can stabilise a tradition and extend its influence, but it can also simplify its internal diversity.
“Polish Education in Transition: Parallel Models”
With Anna Maria Kola. International Journal of Social Economics 42, no. 9, 2015, pp. 852–867.
The article examines the transformation of Polish education after 1989 and the expansion of neoliberal, technocratic and bureaucratic models of institutional reform.
It argues that the adoption of market language did not necessarily create autonomous or genuinely competitive institutions. Instead, education was increasingly governed through indicators, administrative procedures and standardised definitions of quality. These mechanisms could push parts of the educational system towards the semi-periphery rather than enabling convergence with established European centres.
The article also analyses alternative educational institutions and practices that developed outside the dominant model. These parallel initiatives demonstrate the possibility of combining academic quality with civic participation, mentoring and forms of education organised around community rather than mass provision.
“University as a Dry-Cleaner’s: An Essay on Academic Reflection on Research and Higher Education in Poland”
Polish title: “Uniwersytet jako pralnia. Esej o stanie akademickiego namysłu nad nauką i szkolnictwem wyższym w Polsce.” Rocznik Pedagogiczny 35, 2012, pp. 93–110. Published in Polish with an English summary.
The essay critically examines how Polish academia responded to the transformation of higher education after the collapse of communism.
It argues that universities too readily accepted a language of bureaucratic measurement, market adjustment and technocratic modernisation without developing a sufficiently strong intellectual account of their own social purpose. The problem was not evaluation itself, but the substitution of indicators and procedures for substantive debate about academic community, education and the public responsibilities of knowledge.
The essay places Polish higher education within a centre–semi-periphery framework. Institutional reform does not automatically produce convergence with dominant systems. It can also deepen dependency when universities imitate external forms without possessing comparable resources or the autonomy to adapt them.
Selected Public Contributions
“Europe’s Strategic Autonomy Depends on Open and Secure Science”
LSE European Politics, forthcoming in 2026.
The essay argues that research security should not be treated as a policy of closing European science.
Europe’s strategic autonomy depends on its ability to protect sensitive knowledge, data and infrastructure while remaining an attractive and reliable partner in international research. A system based primarily on restrictions would weaken the openness, mobility and collaboration on which European science depends.
The central challenge is institutional capacity. Universities need professional support for due diligence, cybersecurity, data governance and responsible internationalisation. Without shared European investment, research security may become a privilege of institutions already able to afford it.
Link to be added following publication.
“Universities Cannot Deliver Europe’s Ambitions on Project Funding Alone”
Science|Business, 2 July 2026.
The essay argues that a larger European research budget will not produce its intended results if the institutions expected to implement it continue to lose organisational capacity.
Research projects depend on conditions created before a call is published: stable teams, laboratories, doctoral schools, professional support and international partnerships. Competitive project funding rewards institutions already prepared to compete, but it cannot by itself create or maintain the foundations from which successful projects emerge.
The article calls for a clearer European architecture combining core funding, institutional excellence programmes, cohesion instruments and competitive project funding. A successful funding system should leave behind not only publications and project outputs, but also stronger institutions able to compete again.
“Europe Invests in Research but Underinvests in Forming Researchers”
Times Higher Education Campus, 24 June 2026.
Europe has developed sophisticated instruments for supporting research excellence, mobility and scientific careers. Yet researcher development is still often assumed to begin at doctoral level.
The article argues that students become researchers much earlier: when they formulate questions, collect evidence, analyse results and communicate findings. Undergraduate research should therefore be treated as a strategic part of Europe’s research ecosystem rather than an optional educational enrichment.
Connecting the European Education Area with the European Research Area requires universities to integrate research-based learning, mentoring, student grants, mobility and early participation in research teams.
“University Alliances Should Be Engines of Distributed Excellence”
Science|Business, 20 May 2026.
The essay argues that European University alliances should move beyond mobility, shared branding and educational cooperation to become infrastructures for research capacity building.
Alliances should not receive protected access to Horizon Europe funding simply because they exist. They can, however, help excellent institutions outside established research centres enter strong consortia by reducing transaction costs, connecting complementary teams and sharing grant intelligence, mentoring and professional support.
The article develops the concept of distributed excellence as an alternative to the false opposition between competitiveness and cohesion. Europe’s research system becomes stronger when excellence can emerge across a wider institutional geography without weakening scientific standards.
Selected Talks
“Dual-Use Research and the Responsibility of Universities”
YERUN General Assembly, University of South-Eastern Norway, Kongsberg, March 2026.
The intervention addressed the growing responsibility of universities for the possible uses of the knowledge and technologies they produce.
Dual-use research creates tensions between scientific openness and security, academic freedom and institutional responsibility. The central question is not only which applications should be prohibited, but who should define the boundaries of acceptable use and how universities can make proportionate decisions without turning research security into generalised suspicion.
The discussion also emphasised that non-engagement is no longer a viable institutional strategy. Universities must develop the capacity to assess risk while retaining their commitment to open and international science.
“Research Infrastructure for Strategic Technologies”
Opening remarks, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, March 2026.
The intervention examined the changing role of major research infrastructures in an environment shaped by technological competition and geopolitical conflict.
Research facilities are not only scientific resources. They increasingly form part of Europe’s strategic capacity in areas such as quantum technologies, space, communications, resilience and civil security. This requires transparent governance frameworks for cooperation, access and dual-use projects.
The central argument was that research security does not mean closing science. It means creating institutional conditions in which open cooperation can continue responsibly despite heightened technological and geopolitical risk.
European Flagship Conference on Research Security
European Commission and European research organisations, Brussels, 28–30 October 2025.
Representing YERUN and Nicolaus Copernicus University, I participated in the opening high-level dialogue and in the session “Getting Started with Research Security: Safeguarding and Advancing Open and Secure R&I Through Institutional Practices.”
My interventions emphasised that research security must be embedded in university governance rather than treated only as an operational response to individual incidents. The protection of research also includes continuity: maintaining researchers’ access to infrastructure, data and institutional support during war or disruption.
I also argued that the balance between openness and security cannot be identical for all institutions. It must reflect their research profiles, capacities and exposure to risk. European coordination is needed to prevent security requirements from producing new inequalities between research systems.
“Global Knowledge Transfer: Is Complexity Science a Remedy for the Weaknesses of ‘Presumptive History’?”
Institute for Advanced Study, University of Amsterdam, 14 December 2021.
The lecture presented the conceptual foundations of the project on multidirectional knowledge transfer from Central and Eastern Europe.
It questioned historical explanations that infer large intellectual processes from a limited number of prominent cases. Knowledge transfer depends on interacting networks, institutions, languages, migrations and political disruptions. A complexity-science perspective may help historians move beyond linear models without abandoning detailed archival research.
“A Laboratory for Humanists, Scientists in Everyday Life: A Shot of Vodka and Cages for Lice”
Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago, 5 February 2018.
The lecture examined the informal and material conditions of scientific work through the history of the Polish-American virologist Ludwik Gross.
It showed how research develops through laboratory routines, personal relations, practical improvisation and forms of hospitality that rarely enter official accounts of scientific discovery. Scientific knowledge is produced not only through formal methods, but also through everyday institutional environments and interactions among people, organisms, instruments and spaces.
The lecture contributed to my broader work on the informal infrastructures through which knowledge moves between countries and institutions.