The Centre for Polish-Lithuanian Studies was opened just before the Covid crisis hit. This has disrupted our activities, but we constructing our website, and are planning activities for the next academic year. The Centre will be hosting two visiting scholars in the autumn, Dr Karol Żojdź, from the Centre for the History of Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Dr Steffen Huber, from the Institute of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, who has been awarded a fellowship by Aberdeen’s Bednarowski Trust. We are planning to hold a symposium while they are in Aberdeen, and other activities for the autumn and winter terms of 2021-2.
In the meantime, you may be interested in an online lecture I am giving to the Jagiellonian Law Society and the University of Pennsylvania on 8th March, at 5pm UK time. The full title of the lecture is entitled
Lex est Rex? The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Administration of Republican Justice after 1569
and registration details are contained in the attached poster.
A recording of a lecture I gave last month for a Ringvorlesung organised by the universities of Halle-Wittenberg and Jena has been posted on You Tube:
Robert Frost: A State so Oddly Constituted? The Political Culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Union
The webinar features a distinguished academic – Professor Robert Frost, who will analyze the governing systems of the vast multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-cultural Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He will examine theunderlying political philosophy of that Polish-Lithuanian Union, demonstrating how it functioned for 200 years. Professor Frost posits that if one understands the underlying laws and philosophy, the Union was by no means as dysfunctional as is usually suggested.
Professor Frost is a renowned historian and academic interested in Eastern and Northern Europe of the 14th till 19th centuries with a primary focus on the Polish-Lithuanian Union and the history of the period’s warfare. He holds the Burnett Fletcher Chair of History at the School for Divinity, History, and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. He has earned his doctorate in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College London (UCL) and is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of the Arts and Sciences and a British Academy member. He was awarded numerous prizes for his latest book, including the Pro Historia Polonorum Prize.
