Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
Stanley Bill works on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, and on contemporary political discourse in Poland. He has particular interests in populist discourse, postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural and political history, the poetics of the body, religion and secularization, and Polish-Ukrainian relations. He is the author of Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (2021). He has published articles on populism and civil society in Poland; the discourse of the current Polish government (with Ben Stanley); postcolonial theory in the Polish context; legacies of Polish Romanticism; and the works of Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He has published translations of Czesław Miłosz's novel The Mountains of Parnassus (Yale University Press, 2017) and a selection of short stories by Bruno Schulz entitled Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories (London, 2022).
He is Director of the Slavonic Studies Section and Chair of the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES). In 2018, he received the Best Lecturer Award at the Annual Student-Led Teaching Awards from the Cambridge University Student Union.
He is founder and editor-at-large of the news and opinion website Notes from Poland, where he also hosts the NfP Podcast.
Dr Bill worked at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before coming to Cambridge. He completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in the United States. He originally hails from Perth, Australia.
Dr Bill welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research plans relevant to his interests.
Books:
Forthcoming: (with Simon Lewis), ed., Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2023).
Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
(with Tomasz Bilczewski and Magdalena Popiel ) ed., The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (London: Routledge, 2021).
(with Magdalena Popiel and Tomasz Bilczewski) ed., Światowa historia literatury polskiej [A World History of Polish Literature] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2020).
Selected Articles and Book Chapters:
- “Counter-Elite Populism and Civil Society in Poland: PiS's Strategies of Elite Replacement.” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 36.1 (February 2022): 118-140 (first published online September 16, 2020).
- "Wiosna Brunona Schulza: historia i mit" ["Bruno Schulz's Spring: History and Myth]. Światowa historia literatury polskiej [A World History of Polish Literature], ed. Magdalena Popiel, Tomasz Bilczewski, and Stanley Bill (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2020), 377-395.
- (with Ben Stanley) "Whose Poland is it to be? PiS and the struggle between monism and pluralism." East European Politics 36.3 (July 2020): 378-394.
- “Translating the World: Miłosz in English,” Plurilinguisme et auto-traduction: langue perdue, langue sauvée, eds. Anna Lushenkova Foscolo and Mauogocha Smorag-Goldberg (Paris: Eur’Orbem Éditions, 2019).
- “Chwasty Schulza” (“Schulz’s Weeds”). Konteksty 1-2 (2019).
- "The Splintering of a Myth: Polish Romantic Ideology in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, eds. Przemysław Czapliński, Joanna Niżyńska, and Tamara Trojanowska (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).
- “Propaganda on the Margins: Bruno Schulz’s Soviet Illustrations, 1940-41.” Slavonic and East European Review 96.3 (July 2018): 432-468.
- "Translator's Introduction: Science Fiction as Scripture." The Mountains of Parnassus by Czesław Miłosz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
- “Dualism, Dostoevskii and the Devil in History: Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Neo-Manichaean’ Theory of Russian Culture.” Slavonic and East European Review 93.3 (July 2015): 401-428.
- “Melting in the Mirror: Woman, Body and Self in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz.” Slavic and East European Journal 58.4 (Winter 2014): 645-662.
- "Schulz i znikająca granica" ("Bruno Schulz and the Disappearing Border"). Schulz / Forum 4 (2014): 22-29.
- “Father Zossima’s Body: Decay, Abjection and Resurrection in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov." Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 28.1-2 (2014): 1-32.
- “Seeking the Authentic: Polish Culture and the Nature of Postcolonial Theory.” nonsite.org (Online Journal in the Humanities) #12 (August 2014).
- “Miłosz patrzy na ciało, jakby w zwierciadle, niejasno” (“Miłosz Looks at the Body Through a Glass, Darkly”), in: Miłosz i Miłosz. Eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski and Łukasz Tischner (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014).
- “Dorożka w lesie: Schulz i pisanie” (“The Carriage in the Forest: Bruno Schulz and Writing”). Schulz / Forum 2 (2013): 25-34.
- “Miłosz w dialogu z literackim centrum świata” (“Miłosz in Dialogue with the Literary Center of the World”). Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne: Seria Literacka (Poznań Polish Studies: Literary Series) 20.40 (2012): 137-150.
- “Iambic,” “Eye Rhyme,” “Ring Composition” and “Fourteener” (co-author), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Selected Translations (from Polish):
- Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories, by Bruno Schulz (London: Pushkin Press, 2022).
- "Undula," by Bruno Schulz, Notes from Poland (11 July 2020).
- The Mountains of Parnassus, by Czesław Miłosz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
- The Old Axolotl, by Jacek Dukaj. Digital novel with illustrations by Marcin Panasiuk and Alex Jaeger (Warsaw: Allegro, 2015).
- Miłosz and the Problem of Evil, by Łukasz Tischner (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015).
- Totalitarian Speech, by Michał Głowiński (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Publishers, 2014).
- “The Plunderer’s Daughter,” by Jacek Dukaj. Tarnów: 1000 Years of Modernity (Warsaw: 40000 Malarzy, 2011).
