2017 got off to a great start for one of our favorite people – the Poznan-based Stanford scholar Ewa Domanska. (We’ve written about her here.) She just got a big promotion from the President of Poland – with a big celebration at the Polish equivalent of the “White House” in Warsaw. The chic scholar is now a full professor of the human sciences. She teaches most of the year at the Department of History in the Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznan. Her teaching and research interests include comparative theory of the human and social sciences, history and theory of historiography, posthumanities and ecological humanities. She’s into “posthumanism,” too.
We met over our mutual interest in a mutual friend, the late French theorist René Girard. She’s told me of his influence in Poland during the Solidarity years, when his theories about violence were daily realities for the Poles, who were reading The Scapegoat in their classrooms.
From her letter:
Just before Christmas I received an official letter from the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland that he granted me the title of full professor (so-called “Belweder”) of the human sciences. In Poland, the procedure is long and takes two to three years. You have five independent reviewers who evaluate your academic achievements and the book that is presented as your main “opus,” and one super-reviewer who evaluates the work of reviewers (formal procedure) and also summarizes all what was said about the achievements. Last Wednesday, there was a big celebration in Warsaw in the Presidential Palace, where I received an official document. It was a very nice event, where fifty-nine new professor got their promotion from hands of the President, Andrzej Duda. We came with families and friends.”
And one of them snapped the photo above.
Ewa teaches at Stanford every spring. It looks like we’ll celebrate with a little champagne when she comes back to California in March.
Tags: Ewa Domanska, René Girard