Monday, 21 May 2018, 6:00pm

Latimer Room, Clare College, Cambridge  

Deputy Director of the Warsaw Rising Museum, Dr Paweł Ukielski, discussed his involvement with the Museum from its establishment in 2004 to the present, while also commenting on larger trends in Polish perceptions of the nation’s past in the years since 1989.  

This talk was the first in a series of events sponsored by the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES) exploring the different ways in which historical events are being portrayed in Central and Eastern Europe today, with a particular focus on efforts to infuse technology and trends in popular culture into narratives of past events so as to appeal to younger generations. The event - co-organised by Cambridge Polish Studies - was hosted by Chelsea Michta, a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of History currently working on the memory of the Warsaw Rising.     

Dr Paweł Ukielski is a political scientist, historian, and the current Deputy Director of the Warsaw Rising Museum (2004-2014, and since 2016). He is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences and a lecturer at the Collegium Civitas University. From 2014-16 he was vice president of the Institute of National Remembrance, and from 2011-17 he served on the Executive Board of the Platform of European Remembrance and Conscience. He has conducted research and taught courses on the Central-East European post-communist transition, regional cooperation in East-Central Europe, the break-up of Czechoslovakia, Czech-Slovak relations, and the politics of remembrance. He is the author of Aksamitny rozwód. Rola elit politycznych w procesie podziału Czechosłowacji (‘The velvet divorce. The role of political elites in the division of Czechoslovakia’), published in 2007, and the co-author of 1989 – Jesień Narodów (‘1989 – The Autumn of Nations’), the Polish edition of which was published in 2009. He has written for several Polish and European academic journals and is the author of a report published in 2016 entitled Mapa Trójmorza. Przegląd punktów wspólnych i rozbieżności w polityce 12 państw regionu (‘A map of the three seas. An overview of common points and discrepancies in the policies of the 12 countries in the region’).