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 contemporary Polish politics. 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) and Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). He has published articles on populism and civil society in Poland; the politics of the PiS-led 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).
His forthcoming book, co-authored with Ben Stanley, is Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2025).
He is Director of the Slavonic Studies Section and former Chair of the Cambridge Committee for Central and East European and Eurasian Studies (CamCCEEES) (2019-23). 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.
Professor 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.
Professor Bill welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research plans relevant to his interests.
Books:
Monographs:
- Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution, co-authored with Ben Stanley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025). [Forthcoming]
- Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
- 2023 Jan Kochanowski Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of Polish Studies, International Association for Polish Studies.
Edited Volumes:
- Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives, co-edited with Simon Lewis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).
- 2024 Honorable Mention, Anna M. Cienciala Award for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA).
- The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature, co-edited with Tomasz Bilczewski and Magdalena Popiel (London: Routledge, 2021).
- Światowa historia literatury polskiej [A World History of Polish Literature], co-edited with Magdalena Popiel and Tomasz Bilczewski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2020).
Selected Articles and Book Chapters:
- “Polish Studies and the ‘Decolonization’ Paradigm after Russia's Invasion of Ukraine.” Konteksty Kultury 21.1 (2024): 23-29.
- “The Ukrainian Sublime: Nineteenth-Century Polish Visions of the East,” in Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives, ed. Stanley Bill and Simon Lewis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), 157-180.
- (with Simon Lewis). “Introduction: Diverse Histories and Contested Memories,” in Multicultural Commonwealth: Poland-Lithuania and Its Afterlives, ed. Stanley Bill and Simon Lewis (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), 3-24.
- “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).
- “History and Myth: Bruno Schulz’s Spring,” in The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature, ed. Tomasz Bilczewski, Stanley Bill, and Magdalena Popiel (London: Routledge, 2021), 238-250.
- (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,” in Plurilinguisme et auto-traduction: langue perdue, langue sauvée, ed. 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,” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, ed. 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.
- “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.
- “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).
- “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), in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, and Paul Rouzer (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).
