New Director of SSEES

From 27 August 2014

We are very pleased to announce that the new Director of SSEES will be Professor Jan Kubik. 

Professor Kubik comes to SSEES from Rutgers University, NJ, where he currently holds the Chair of Political Science. After studying sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and several years of teaching in the Department of Sociology there, Professor Kubik earned his doctoral degree in anthropology at Columbia University defending his thesis entitled, ‘The Role of Symbols in the Legitimation of Power. Poland: 1976-1981’. His interest is in social movements and protest politics and the complex interplay between power (politics) and culture. The latter was stimulated by the “exhilarating experience” of the first Solidarity period in Poland.

His research is now concentrated in the fields of civil society, social movements, and protest politics; the relationship between politics and culture; and post-communist transformations. He is involved in a major international project entitled “Strategies of collective protest in democratizing societies: Poland, Hungary, South Korea, and Taiwan” and has completed the stage of data collection in preparation for publication. Kubik’s most recent book is a volume prepared with Michael Bernhard, Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford, 2014).

Professor Kubik commented that he is “very proud” to be taking on the Directorship of SSEES. “I have been searching for a place where interdisciplinarity is seen not as a refuge for disciplinary eccentrics, but as a source of indispensable cross-fertilization. SSEES in this respect is a dream institution. It is constituted so as to create opportunities to roam freely between various fields of knowledge. As its Director, I very much hope that I will be able to find new ways not only to amplify this unique métier, but also to make new converts to its allure.”

He joins us in January 2015.