The Center for Totalitarian Studies - Instytut Pileckiego
The Center for Totalitarian Studies gathers researchers who specialize in political science, sociology, history, and Jewish studies. This unique milieu of scholars implements interdisciplinary research projects devoted to totalitarianism and the history of Poland in the 20th century. Research focuses primarily on events connected with World War II, the conflict’s impact on societies and politics in the second half of the 20th century, and the cultivation of memory by the second and third postwar generations.
While conducting their own research projects, employees of the Center utilize collections acquired by the Institute, which together form a digital archive containing documents relating to the history of Poland and Polish citizens in the 20th century. As part of their activities they popularize and disseminate the results of their studies, in particular abroad. To this end they organize debates, seminars, and international scientific conferences.
Selected research projects conducted by employees of the Center with the participation of cooperating scholars:
Department for the study of communism and Soviet occupation during the Second World War
Department for the study of Nazism and German occupation during the Second World War
Department for the study of totalitarianism, politics and international law
Research unit for the study of social anthropology of totalitarian and post-totalitarian systems
The Department of Anthropologies of Totalitarianism and Post-Totalitarianism at the Pilecki Institute conducts interdisciplinary research on how totalitarian and post-totalitarian systems shape everyday life, culture, memory, and social relations. Bringing together scholars from history, cultural studies, sociology, and related fields, it examines such systems not only as political orders but as lived conditions that structure behaviour, feeling, identity, and belonging. Its work focuses on the legacies of coercion, violence, propaganda, and ideological rule across Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet space, and other regions shaped by comparable regimes. Combining archival, ethnographic, digital, and computational methods, the department contributes to international scholarship on the lived experience and afterlives of (post-)totalitarianism.
Research Projects Department
Ewa Serafin-Prusator
Manager
Karolina Goździk-Lelewska
Dorota Sokolik