Dr. Małgorzata Mazurek to head the Polish Chair at Columbia University

In September, the first students will begin classes in the new Chair at New York University.

Polish Chair will conduct research and teach Polish history, as well as the social sciences, political sciences and humanities in relation to Poland and the region of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as award master\'s and doctoral degrees. The program is intended for students from all over the world.

Polish Chair at Columbia University has been funded by donations of Polish and Polish-American companies, institutions and organizations, as well as the generosity of anonymous and individual donors. According to the Foundation for Polish Science, the collection of the minimum amount of endowment fund ($3 million) was completed in 2009, as a result of the campaign carried out by the Foundation for Polish Science and the Polish Consulate in New York. "The current value of the endowment fund for the Polish Chair is $4.5 million" - reads the Foundation release sent to PAP.

Dr. Malgorzata Mazurek is a postdoc at the Department of History at Columbia University since 2012. Previously, she worked at the Centre for the Contemporary History Potsdam and at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. She also lectured at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Warsaw.

According to the Foundation for Polish Science, Mazurek graduated from sociology and history at the College of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the University of Warsaw and the School of Social Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAS.

Her research interests include social history of nineteenth and early twentieth century Poland and CEE, history of the social sciences, historical anthropology, and Polish-Jewish relations. She is currently working on the history of Polish scholars who in the postwar years were members of an interdisciplinary and international group dealing with issues of development, planning and social issues in developing countries.

She is a fellow of Marie Curie Fellowship, Henkel Foundation M4Human Programme, Stiftung Aufarbeitung and the Foundation for Polish Science (twice winner of the START scholarship for young scientists). Author of books: "Socialist Factory. Workers in People’s Poland and in the GDR on the Eve of the Sixties" (2005), "Waiting in Lines. On Experiences of Scarcity in Postwar Poland" (2010), as well as numerous articles and book chapters published in Polish, English, German and French. She is fluent in four languages. (PAP)

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