Graduate Academy Experts - Instytut Pileckiego

Our experts, lecturers and speakers

Dr. Robert Citino
Dr. Robert Citino (World War II Musuem in New Orleans), PhD, Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian. Dr. Citino is an award-winning military historian and scholar who has published ten books including "The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943", "Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942", and "The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich" and numerous articles covering World War II and 20th century military history. He speaks widely and contributes regularly to general readership magazines such as "World War II". Dr. Citino enjoys close ties with the U.S. military establishment, and taught one year at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and two years at the U.S. Army War College.

Dr. John Dunn 

Dr. John Dunn (Valdosta State University), a professor of History at Valdosta State University.  His course load includes Slavic Europe since 1700, and directing study abroad in Poland. Dunn's MA thesis examined Polish Defense Planning, 1919-1939; while Ph.D. dissertation studied the role of foreign military advisors in the 19th Century Egyptian army.  He authored "Khedive Ismail's Army" (Routledge, 2005), along with articles on 19th and 20th Century topics in Journal of Military History, War in HistoryJournal of Slavic Military StudiesThe Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Polish American Studies.  He is currently writing a history of Poland's November Uprising.

Jack Fairweather
Jack Fairweather (author, former war correspondent), the bestselling author of "The Volunteer", the Costa Prize winning account of a Polish underground officer who volunteered to report on Nazi crimes in Auschwitz. The book has been translated into 25 languages and forms the basis of a major exhibition in Berlin. He has served as the Daily Telegraph’s Baghdad bureau chief, and as a video journalist for the Washington Post in Afghanistan. His war coverage has won a British Press Award and an Overseas Press Club award citation. He divides his time between the UK and Vermont.

Dr. Monika Karniauskaite
Dr. Monika Kareniauskaitė is a Lithuanian legal historian specializing in Soviet and post-Soviet studies. She is currently a Research Fellow, working in the Lithuanian Institute of History and in the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences. 

She conducts research on gender-based violence in twentieth-century Lithuania, anti-Soviet resistance, Soviet political trials and deportations, the dissident movement, historical memory and the culture of remembrance in the former Eastern Bloc and USSR. She is co-author and co-editor of Anti-Communist Opposition in Poland and Lithuania: a Similar, Common, or Parallel Phenomenon? (Vilnius, 2015).

Dr. Wojciech Kozłowski 
Dr. Wojciech Kozłowski (Director of the Pilecki Institute), PhD, the director of the Pilecki Institute, a research institution based in Warsaw, and the chief editor of its scholarly journal "Totalitarian and 20th Century Studies". He holds Ph.D. in medieval studies from Central European University and M.A. in history from the University of Warsaw. He was a fellow at the New Europe College and a visiting scholar at the Department of History at Harvard.

Dr. Chris Millington

Dr. Chris Millington is a historian of extremism and violence in twentieth-century France. His published work includes France in the Second World War (2020) and A History of Fascism in France (2019). He works at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Clare Mulley

Clare Mulley is an award-winning author and broadcaster, primarily looking at female experience in the Second World War. Published works include The Woman Who Saved the Children about Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children; The Spy Who Loved (Kobieta Szpieg), on the Polish born British special agent Krystyna Skarbek (Christine Granville), and The Women Who Flew for Hitler (Kobiety, Które Latały Dla Hitlera) telling the story of two women at the heart of Nazi Germany, whose actions put them on opposite sides of history. A popular broadcaster on TV and radio, Clare is also Chair of the judges for the British Historical Writers Association prize 2021. Clare is a recipient of the Daily Mail Biographers Club Prize, and the Bene Merito honour of the Republic of Poland.

Roger Moorhouse
Roger Moorhouse (author and historian), a historian specializing in Germany and Poland in World War Two. He is the author of a number of books on the subject, including “The Devils’ Alliance” (2014), “Berlin at War” (2012) and the award-winning “First to Fight” (2019), a history of the September Campaign of 1939, which was published in Poland as “Polska 1939”. He is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Natolin, Warsaw, where he teaches a course on totalitarianism, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London and a recipient of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.

Prof. Michael S. Neiberg

Prof. Michael S. Neiberg is Professor of History and Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work specializes on the First and Second World Wars in global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011) one of the five best books ever written about that war. His latest book is When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Relationship (Harvard University Press, 2021). In 2017 he was awarded the Médaille d'Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, an organization founded by French President Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War. 

Prof. Andrzej Nowak
Prof. Andrzej Nowak (Jagiellonian University), a Polish historian, public intellectual and an author of more than 30 books (among them a multivolume "History of Poland"). He is a professor at the Institute of History of Jagiellonian University and is the head of the Comparative Imperial Studies Section at the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Between 1980 and 1988 Andrzej Nowak was involved in anti-Communist journalistic and educational activities, publishing many articles in so-called underground magazines, such as "Arka", "Miesięcznik Małopolski", "Alternatywy". He is currently the editor of „Kwartalnik Historyczny” (the oldest and most prestigious academic publication in Poland), the chairman of the Council of the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding, as well as a member of the European Network of Remembrance and Solidarity Academic Council. He has received many awards and honors, including the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest order.

Prof. Richard Overy 
Prof. Richard Overy (University of Exeter), a Honorary Research Professor at the University of Exeter, UK. He has written extensively on the European dictatorships and World War II. His book "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia won the 2004 Wolfson Prize. His latest book Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931-1945" is published this year. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz

Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz was born in 1963. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków with a degree in History, and from the Silesian University in Katowice with a PhD. His doctoral thesis, which was completed in 1999 was titled “IG Farben- Werk Auschwitz 1941-1945”. He has worked in the Research Department at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum since 1988. Between 2001-2007 he was the Head of the Archives and in 2008 he became the Head of the Research Department. His research interests are: the employment of prisoners in German industry, the history of sub camps in KL Auschwitz and the SS Garrison among others.

Prof. Johannes-Dieter Steinert
Prof. Johannes-Dieter Steinert (University of Wolverhampton), a professor of Modern European History and Migration Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK (Dr. phil. University of Düsseldorf; Dr. phil. habil. University of Osnabrück). Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2015). Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research 2020. Research interests: international migration and minorities, forced migration, survivors of Nazi persecution, international humanitarian assistance, and child forced labour. Current research project: Sinti and Roma child forced labourers in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe. Forthcoming co-authored monograph: "Przemysłowa concentration camp. The camp – the children – the trials" (working title).

Damien Stewart

Damien Stewart, prior to becoming a Psychologist, he was a Police Officer for 20 years in Sydney. In 2012, Damien completed two masters degrees in Psychology at the University of Queensland. After graduating in 2014, Damien created Room23 Psychology and went into private practice. Damien is currently in the process of applying to LaTrobe University in Melbourne to complete a PhD on Intergenerational Trauma among Pole’s and Jewish-Pole’s following WWII. Registering the business in Poland in 2021, Damien is the Director of Poland at War Tours, a collection of tours designed to explore the occupation of Poland, The Holocaust, and Polish resistance during WWII.

Dr. Anna Stróż-Pawłowska
Dr. Anna Stróż-Pawłowska (Former Director of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II), an art historian, museologist, academic teacher. Former director of The Ulma Family Museum in Markowa. 2016-2020 responsible for Museum's strategy, incl. numerous initiatives honoring Polish Righteous. Her areas of interest are issues related to commemoration, martyrology and contemporary museology.

Prof. Nikolaus Wachsmann

Prof. Nikolaus Wachsmann is professor of modern European history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of KL. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, winner of the 2016 Wolfson History Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. Wachsmann has served on the International Advisory Board Bergen-Belsen, and serves on Academic Advisory Boards at the Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen Memorials. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the 15-volume documentary edition The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, and has developed an educational website, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, about the history of the Nazi camps (www.camps.bbk.ac.uk).

Dr. Małgorzata Wosińska

Dr. Małgorzata Wosińska, a cultural anthropologist, psychotraumatologist. Ph.D (ABD) at Faculty of History at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Her research interests cover a wide range of interrelated disciplines from Critical Holocaust Studies through to the Anthropology of Genocide and Forensic Studies. She is a lecturer (courses in Genocide Theory, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Museum Studies) at the University Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan/PL, Warsaw University (NOHA), Northeastern University Boston/USA, King's College Halifax/CA. She also works with the witnesses of traumatic events. Her doctorial thesis concerns the identity of genocide survivors in Rwanda, where she has conducted regular field research since 2009. She is an author of 39 publications in scientific journals, co-editor of 4 books and 1 collection of reportages reports.

Dr. Elke Gryglewski

Dr. Elke Gryglewski is the director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation and the Memorial Bergen-Belsen. She studied political science in Munich, Berlin and Santiago de Chile. She wrote her Ph.d. on “Young Arab-Palestinian and Turkish Berliners and their relationship with National Socialism and the Shoah: A study of the pedagogy of appreciation”. From 1995 – 2015 she worked in the House of the Wannsee-Conference as a member of the academic-pedagogic staff and from 2015 – 2020 as Deputy Director and head of the educational department. She was a member of the independent panels on Antisemitism established on the basis of Bundestag resolutions. Since 2018 she is expert for the German Foreign Office on the issue of designing a memorial covering the history of the Colonia Dignidad. Her research areas are National Socialism in a global perspective, reckoning with National Socialism after 1945, dealing with National Socialism in the diverse German society.