Welcome

Research

My work examines Europe as a historically uneven and globally entangled space. Rather than treating Europe as a self-contained civilisation, I study how its identities, institutions and intellectual traditions have been formed through empire, migration, cultural transfer, decolonisation and relations with neighbouring and postcolonial worlds.

Central and Eastern Europe is not a marginal addition to this history. It is one of the locations from which Europe’s boundaries, internal hierarchies and global position can be reconsidered. I approach Central Europe not as a permanently defined territory, but as a moving political, cultural and symbolic frontier whose location changes as the meaning of Europe itself is contested.

My first major research field was the comparative history of Czech and Russian Slavophilism. This work introduced questions that have continued to shape my research: how languages become political institutions, how societies situated outside dominant centres respond to imported models of modernity, and how programmes of cultural solidarity can reproduce imperial hierarchies.

I subsequently examined competing ideas of Europe in Polish, Czech and Croatian literary and intellectual traditions. This developed into a broader interest in the internal asymmetries of Europe, semi-peripheral modernities and the ways in which Central and Southeast European intellectuals positioned their societies in relation to both Western Europe and the wider world.

My book Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconfiguration reconstructed an overlooked history of postcolonial reflection in socialist Poland. It challenged the assumption that postcolonial thought entered Central and Eastern Europe only after 1989 through theories developed in Western universities. My research instead demonstrated that socialist intellectuals, writers, journalists and cultural institutions had already participated in debates about colonialism, decolonisation and relations between the socialist Second World and societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This work has led me to the concept of alternative globalities: forms of international connection, cultural circulation and knowledge production that developed outside the dominant institutions of the Western world. I am particularly interested in the possibilities and contradictions of these connections, including anti-colonial solidarity, political instrumentalisation, paternalism and the persistence of European forms of cultural hierarchy.

A parallel strand of my research concerns knowledge: how it is created, translated, transferred, institutionalised and remembered. I have studied translingual scholars, intellectual migration, research schools, informal academic environments, archives and the unequal geography of theoretical authority. My international work at Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the University of Amsterdam provided important institutional settings for developing this research.

My current work extends these questions to the contemporary geopolitics of knowledge. It addresses research security, open science, dual-use research, strategic autonomy, international scientific cooperation and the unequal distribution of research capacity across Europe. I study the university both as an institution that produces and authorises knowledge and as an organisation that must itself be redesigned in response to political, technological and environmental change.

My research draws on comparative literature, intellectual history, memory studies, European Studies, the history of knowledge and research-policy analysis. Its unifying question is how knowledge produced outside dominant centres can alter the categories through which Europe and the world are understood.

Academic Leadership

My present role as Vice-Rector for Research brings together research strategy, institutional transformation and international scientific cooperation. My responsibilities include research governance and performance, doctoral education, innovation and knowledge transfer, research security, excellence policy and the development of institutional conditions supporting ambitious and responsible research.

This appointment followed a sustained progression through academic leadership positions. From 2011 to 2014, I served as Deputy Director of the Institute of Slavonic Philology, with responsibility for staff development, teaching provision and academic planning. From 2016 to 2019, I was Vice-Dean for Management and Development at the Faculty of Languages, where my responsibilities included institutional evaluation, research funding, staff development and cooperation with external stakeholders.

From 2019 to 2020, I served as Vice-Dean for International Cooperation, Management and Development at the Faculty of Humanities. This position combined internationalisation, faculty strategy, research development and institutional crisis management during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between 2019 and 2024, I was the founding Director of IMSErt—Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments, an interdisciplinary University Centre of Excellence. I developed the Centre from its original institutional concept into an international research environment involving approximately forty researchers and postdoctoral fellows from the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

The Centre combined interdisciplinary research with international recruitment, visiting programmes, grant development and cooperation with public institutions. It secured and managed approximately EUR 4.2 million in competitive and strategic funding. I also established its Urban Lab as a platform connecting university research with the city, regional institutions and wider society.

I understand academic leadership as an intellectual as well as organisational practice. Universities cannot respond to contemporary challenges merely by adding new programmes to structures that remain unchanged. Sustainable transformation requires institutions to connect research excellence with researcher formation, professional support, international cooperation, public responsibility and long-term organisational capacity.

It also requires leadership capable of making choices. Resources must be concentrated sufficiently to enable excellent research, while the resulting knowledge, infrastructures and opportunities must remain accessible to the wider academic community. My work therefore combines the pursuit of excellence with the development of more distributed and sustainable institutional capacity.

European and International Engagement

As Vice-President of the Young European Research Universities Network, I contribute to European debates on the future of research-intensive universities. My work within YERUN concerns FP10, the next Multiannual Financial Framework, widening participation, research security, dual-use governance, university alliances and the development of research capacity beyond Europe’s most established metropolitan centres.

A central concern of this work is distributed excellence. Europe requires institutions capable of competing at the highest international level, but it also needs a research system in which excellence is not concentrated permanently within a small group of already privileged universities and regions. University networks can help connect emerging research environments with shared infrastructures, knowledge, partnerships and opportunities.

I am a member of the European University Association Task-and-Finish Group on Sustainability. The group contributes to the development of a long-term perspective on the responsibilities and strategies of European universities beyond the current United Nations 2030 Agenda. This work connects environmental responsibility with institutional governance, research, education and the resilience of universities.

Since 2026, I have served on the International Advisory Board of the LUCK Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge at Lund University. This role is closely connected to my research on the circulation, institutionalisation and sedimentation of knowledge, as well as to my longstanding engagement with the international history of the humanities.

I am also Assistant Secretary-General of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (FILLM), affiliated with the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences and UNESCO. My work in FILLM supports international cooperation in the humanities and the development of links among literary, linguistic and cultural studies across national and disciplinary boundaries.

My earlier European service has included membership of the European Commission’s Core Group on Citizen Engagement for Knowledge Valorisation. I have also worked as an expert and reviewer for the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency and the European Education and Culture Executive Agency.

These roles connect my academic research with direct engagement in European science policy, university strategy and international scholarly cooperation. They also allow me to bring the perspective of a Central European research university into discussions that continue to be shaped predominantly by institutions located in Europe’s established academic centres.

Teaching and Mentoring

I have taught at Nicolaus Copernicus University since 2002. My teaching has included European and Central European studies, comparative and world literature, political and intellectual history, memory studies, post-socialism, cultural studies and the methodology of humanities research.

I have supervised Bachelor’s and Master’s students, doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers. I understand supervision not simply as assistance in completing a thesis or project, but as a process of researcher formation. This involves helping emerging scholars formulate independent research questions, develop methodological confidence, publish their work, build international networks and gradually acquire academic autonomy.

One of my former students, Dr hab. Agata Domachowska, NCU Professor, is now an established scholar of the Western Balkans, national and transnational identities, diasporas and the politics of memory. She subsequently succeeded me as Head of POSTCOMER—the Laboratory for Research on Collective Memory in Post-Communist Europe—and participated, alongside Łukasz Gemziak, in the Millennium research project that I led.

I have also supervised or mentored doctoral and postdoctoral researchers including Jakub Piosik-Beszterda, Łukasz Gemziak, Olga V. Solovieva, Francesco Trupia and Brett Buttliere. Their subsequent careers, publications and institutional roles illustrate what I regard as the most important result of academic mentoring: the transformation of students and early-career researchers into independent scholars and, eventually, academic colleagues.

My doctoral teaching has also included research communication, dissemination and grant-writing workshops. These courses connect academic writing with the broader professional responsibilities of researchers, including project design, public communication, funding strategies and the ethical dimensions of knowledge production.

Public Scholarship

I write and speak for academic, policy and wider public audiences about Europe, universities and the geopolitics of knowledge. My recent public work has addressed Europe’s imperial and post-imperial legacies, EU enlargement, research security, strategic autonomy, university alliances, distributed excellence, research funding and the formation of future researchers.

I do not regard public engagement as an activity separate from research. It is one of the ways in which knowledge acquires social and political meaning. Universities must produce excellent scholarship, but they must also explain how knowledge is created, communicate uncertainty responsibly and make visible the institutional conditions on which reliable knowledge depends.

This has become particularly important in a period marked by declining trust in institutions, political polarisation, disinformation and growing pressure on international scientific cooperation. Science communication cannot be reduced to the simplified translation of expert findings. It must be understood as an infrastructure of trust built through openness, integrity, institutional responsibility and sustained engagement with society.

My public engagement also draws on my institutional roles in university leadership, European networks and regional advisory bodies. These positions provide direct experience of the relationship between research, public policy, economic development and democratic responsibility.

Education and Professional Development

I studied Slavic Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University, where I received my Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree and PhD. I also studied intercultural relations at the University of Warsaw and psychology of religion and the history of Christianity at Charles University in Prague. I completed my habilitation in the humanities in 2020.

My academic education has been complemented by executive and professional development in university leadership, institutional transformation, complexity science, climate decision-making and finance. I completed the Accelerated Management Programme at the Yale School of Management, the first cohort of the European University Association’s Leadership Development Programme, and the Leaders in University Management programme at University College London.

I have also completed the University of Cambridge programme Climate for Decision-Makers, the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Interactive programme and training in venture capital at Imperial College London.

This combination reflects the two interconnected dimensions of my professional work: understanding how ideas, knowledge and institutions develop, and helping build universities capable of responding strategically and responsibly to change.