Ph.D. Jan A. Burek
Biography
In 2014 he graduated with a Master’s degree in History from the College of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw.
In 2016 he obtains a Master of Research at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute of Florence, and in 2021 a PhD degree at the same department. Dissertation entitled ‘Communists and workers in a ‘red town’. A microhistory of party politics and shopfloor relations in a Polish industrial centre from a trans-war perspective, 1926-1951′, written under the supervision of Pavel Kolář and Laura Downs. The work focuses on how female and male workers achieved group and individual agency in the realities of twentieth-century dictatorships and the changing organisation of factory work.
Research interests: history of labour and workers, history of the labour movement, history of cultural gender, history of national identification, microhistory and anthropological history.
Most important scholarly articles
“History Seems Different from the Shop Floor. A Micro-Historical Challenge to Established Caesurae in the History of 20th Century Poland: Transwar Continuities in Żyrardów“, in “Rethinking Period Boundaries. New Approaches to Continuity and Discontinuity in Modern European History and Culture”, eds. L. George and J. McGlynn, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin-Boston 2022
Od company town do miasta socjalistycznego. Konsolidacja władzy komunistycznej w Żyrardowie 1945-1951, in Miasto w procesie przemian od czasów nowożytnych do współczesności. La ville et le processus de transition de l’epoque moderne a nos jours, red. M. Gibiec, Księgarnia Akademicka, Kraków 2019
„From Party Leaders to Social Outcasts. Women’s Political Activism during the Establishment of Communist Power in a Polish Industrial Town (Żyrardów, 1945-1948)“, “History of Communism in Europe” 8 (January 2017): 167–88