“Meet the Authors” with Professor Andrzej NOWAK

The Natolin Library is pleased to announce the inauguration of its series Meet the Authors, organized in cooperation with the European Civilization Chair and the European Neighbourhood Policy Chair. These meetings will enable students and other participants to meet important authors in various disciplines on a more informal basis than is possible with a special lecture, with plenty of time for discussion.

The first speaker in the series is Professor Andrzej NOWAK, of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (his alma mater) and the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He is also a member of the visiting Faculty of the College of Europe at Natolin, and has lectured at many leading universities including Harvard, Columbia and Cambridge. A specialist on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Poland and Russia, Professor NOWAK is remarkable for his multi-volume history of Poland from its origins until the present. The three volumes so far published cover the period to 1468. This is the kind of enterprise usually associated with the giants of nineteenth-century national historiographies.

Professor NOWAK is also the prize-winning author of Pierwsza zdrada Zachodu. 1920 – zapomniany appeasement (The First Treachery of the West. 1920 – A Forgotten Appeasement), published in 2015, in which he critically analyses the imperial mindset and British policy-making at the time of the Polish-Soviet war. This is linked to his achievements in developing the interdisciplinary field of imperiology, in which he has published History and Geopolitics: A Contest for Eastern Europe (2008) and Imperiological Studies: A Polish Perspective (2011). Besides being Poland's most eminent professional historians, Professor NOWAK is also a prominent public intellectual, who is much involved in Polish and European debates about the politics of history, memory and museums.

Some of Professor NOWAK's books will be exhibited in the Library. The meeting will be chaired by Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI.

The meeting is open to the public. In order to register please send an e-mail to Mr Wiktor POŹNIAK at wiktor.pozniak [at] coleurope.eu by 23 October 2017.