Piotr Kosicki 

MEMBER-AT-LARGE CANDIDATE

Piotr Kosicki is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. He works at the intersection of East European and global/transnational history, incorporating intellectual and religious history, collective biography, and cultural memory. Author of Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891-1956 (Yale, 2018), he is presently writing the story of Polish and Venezuelan activists who partnered in the 1950s and ‘60s to forge political economies of resistance against developmentalism from the Global North. He has held, e.g., a Fulbright in Warsaw, a Sheptyts’kyi Fellowship in Vienna, and a Schlesinger Fellowship in Boston. He has written for The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Project Syndicate.  

Kosicki is passionate about collegial initiatives harnessing the combined strengths of diverse, multilingual teams. He has (co)edited eight volumes, whose contributors span eighteen countries. Since 2021, he is associate editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers; his New Books Network podcasting counts nearly thirty episodes. His greatest professional challenge has been to help Maryland first launch, and now sustain, partnerships with Ukrainian universities. Having piloted joint online classrooms with Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko University, Kosicki represents Maryland within the IU/Big-10 Ukrainian Non-Residential Scholars Program leadership. International education must navigate manifold challenges: in our field, this means Russia’s war on Ukraine, but also attacks on US academic freedom and infrastructure. Kosicki has learned resourcefulness and political sensitivity, while standing by our fundamental values as scholars. 

Kosicki attended his first ASEEES meeting in 2007. He served two terms on the Polish Studies Association’s Board, plus its Article Prize Committee. He has chaired the ASEEES Kulczycki Prize Committee and served on the convention program committee and the Zelnik Prize Committee. As ASEEES member-at-large, Kosicki will labor to expand the association’s work to support at-risk colleagues and communities on both sides of the Atlantic, while advocating for collaborative transatlantic initiatives. With our profession under assault from manifold state and non-state actors alike, we have all become vulnerable. ASEEES members can count on  Kosicki’s energy in challenging times.