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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Prof Stanley Bill

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Position(s): 
Professor of Polish Studies
Department/Section: 
Slavonic Studies
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
Contact details: 
Telephone number: 
+44 (0)1223 335 016
Location: 

Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom

About: 

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).

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.

Published works: 

 

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:

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).