On 20 June 2018, at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the Chairholder of the European Civilization Chair, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, delivered the inaugural lecture to the conference "Bacciarelli i jego czasy", devoted to Marcello Bacciarelli, the court painter of the last King of Poland, and his times.
The lecture, "Polityka i kultura w czasach Stanisława Augusta", explored the overlap and tensions between the politics of culture exemplified by Bacciarelli’s paintings and the political culture of the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The conference accompanied the major exhibition currently showing at the Royal Castle: "Marcello Bacciarelli: The Most Beautiful Portraits".
On 29 June 2018, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI delivered the keynote lecture to the V Annual Meeting on the History of Pathology and Medicine, organized by the History of Pathology Working Group of the European Society of Pathology. For the first time this event was held in Poland, at the Medical University in Gdańsk, and gathered pathologists, historians and historians of art. Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI’s lecture marked the centenary of the recovery of Polish independence with reflections on the question "Poland in 1918: Restoration or Metamorphosis?". He argued that while Poland’s independent statehood was undoubtedly restored at the end of the First World War, the profound and ongoing changes in the Polish nation, although initiated before the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century, amounted to a metamorphosis.