Dr Piotr Wciślik

February - July 2020
Mail: piotr.wcislik(at)ibl.waw(dot)pl

Piotr Wciślik is a historian, who specialises in Intellectual History and Digital Humanities. He is assistant professor and deputy director of the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and is the Grant Holder's Scientific Representative in the COST Action New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (NEP4DISSENT). In both positions, he promotes digital data curation methods for advanced research usage and their application in the study of intellectual and cultural history. He received his PhD summa cum laude from the Central European University in Budapest for a dissertation on unlicensed publishing in Poland under late socialism (see below). He has published extensively on the history of dissident political thought and dissident media.

Research project at the Kolleg

The main purpose of my project is the preparation of my doctoral dissertation License: The Prefigurative Politics of Polish Dissident Social Media Activism, 1976-1990, for publication. The book project focuses on findings from samizdat studies, media history, and history of dissident political thought in order to reappraise the legacy of unlicensed print culture in Poland between 1976 and 1990. It is a study of the samizdat medium, which aims to comprehend its historical novelty from an intellectual history point of view, and it is a history of dissident political thought that explores how oppositional ideas work ‘on the ground’, so to speak. What did underground editors, printers and distributors think they were doing politically and how did they understand the meaning of dissent for themselves? In what sense did one imagine unlicensed print culture as a space for practicing democracy? Why were certain media forms and certain ways of doing business of publishing considered more in tune with their sense of freedom than others were? How did their beliefs and convictions relate to the intellectual trends in the broader dissident movement and how did these dynamics develop over time?

Main areas of research

Dissident political thought
Samizdat media
Digital humanities

Positions and memberships

The Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences | Deputy Director, Assistant Professor
New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (NEP4DISSENT, COST Action CA16213, nep4dissent.eu) | Grant Holder's Scientific Representative
Member of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Member of the European Association for Digital Humanities (AEDH).
Member of the Bibliographical Data Working Group of the European Consortium Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU).

Edited volumes

Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik, eds, Thinking through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015).

Articles

Nicole Burgonye, Friederike Kind-Kovács, Jessie Labov, Veronika Tuckerová, and Piotr Wciślik, ‘Unlicensed and Unbound: Researching Textual Traffic (Samizdat/Tamizdat) and Information Flow Across Borders’ in The Handbook of COURAGE: Cultural Opposition and Its Heritage in Eastern Europe

, edited by Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and Sándor Horváth ( Budapest: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2018), 415-443. doi.org/10.24389/handbook

Piotr Wciślik, ‘The Rubber Waistband and The Resistor: Solidarity Radio and Media Fantasies of Emancipation under Late-Socialism in Poland’, Acta Poloniae Historica 115 (2017): 175-210. http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/APH.2017.115.07

Piotr Wciślik, ‘“Totalitarianism” and the Limits of Polish Dissident Political Thought: Late socialism and after’ in Thinking through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989, edited by Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015), 73-107.

Piotr Wciślik, ‘Movement, Enterprise, Network: The Political Economy of Polish Underground Press’ in Samizdat. Between Practices and Representations, edited by Valentina Parisi (Budapest: Central European University, Institute for Advanced Studies, 2015), 73-86.