Abstract

An international conference across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together historical, political, cultural, sociological and philosophical perspectives on original Polish contributions to the history of political ideas.

The conference aims to put experts from a range of different fields into dialogue to examine Polish political thought in an international context.

Convened by Arkady Rzegocki, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in London, and Stanley Bill, Lecturer in Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Conference programme

10:00 Registration and Coffee

10:30 Welcome: Arkady Rzegocki and Stanley Bill

11:00 Panel 1: Interwar Poland

• Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski (University College London), A Republican Turn? The Reputation of the Commonwealth from Roman Dmowski and Władysław Konopczyński to Andrzej Nowak and Lech Kaczyński
• Marek Kornat (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences), Roman Dmowski’s Vision of the New Europe after the Great War
• Adam Balcer (Centre for East European Studies, University of Warsaw), Muslims, Prometheanism, and the Legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Interwar Period

12:30 Lunch Break

13:30 Panel 2: Communist Poland

• George Gömöri (Emeritus Fellow, Darwin College, University of Cambridge), The Impact of Polish Thought and Literature upon Hungary in 1956
• Jan Kubik (University College London), The Most Artful of Dodgers: Implicit Theories of the Political in Polish Sociological Thought
• Elżbieta Ciżewska-Martyńska (University of Warsaw), Pre-Political or Anti-Political? Polish Dissident Discourse of the Late 1970s and 1980s

Discussant: Dariusz Karłowicz (Editor-in-Chief of Teologia Polityczna)

15:00 Coffee

15:30 Panel 3: Post-1989 Poland

• Aleks Szczerbiak (University of Sussex), The (Contested) Polish Transition to Democracy: A (Problematic) Model for Other Countries?
• Brian Porter-Szűcs (University of Michigan), PiS and the Legacy of National Communism
• Ewa Ochman (University of Manchester), Memory and Politics: The Transformation of the Commemorative Landscape in Post-Communist Poland

17:00 Final Discussion

17:30 Wine Reception

All attendees are welcome to join the speakers for coffee and tea at the beginning of the day and in the afternoon coffee break.

Attendees are free to attend the whole day or just selected panels.

Please register for your free ticket at http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/polish/political-thought