Piotr Wróbel

Professor, Department of History
Affiliated Faculty, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
Fellow, Trinity College
Piotr J. Wróbel

Areas of interest

  • Polish history
  • History of Eastern and East-Central Europe
  • World War I
  • Jewish history
  • Violence, war, and genocide

Biography

Biography

Piotr J. Wrobel holds the Konstanty Reynart Chair of Polish Studies at the University of Toronto. Prior to his appointment in 1994, he taught Polish, Modern European, German and Russian history at the University of Warsaw, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Michigan State University at East Lansing and at the University of California at Davis. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw and has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of European History at Mainz, at Humboldt University in Berlin, and at the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies at Oxford. During 1987-1991 he was a research fellow at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and during 1987-88 he served as research director of a clandestine Eastern Archives, which collected materials about the Polish deportees in the Soviet Union after 1939. He serves on the Advisory Board of Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, and he has authored or co-authored seven books and more than 75 scholarly articles. His most recent book is The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy co-edited with M. B. B. Biskupski and James S. Pula (Ohio University Press, 2010).

 

Select publications

  • “The Seeds of Violence. The Brutalization of an East European Region, 1917-1921,” Journal of Modern European History (Munich), vol. 1, no. 1 (2003), pp. 125-149.
  •  “Class War or Ethnic Cleansing? Soviet Deportations of Polish Citizens from the Eastern Provinces of Poland, 1939-1941,” The Polish Review, vol. 59, no. 2, 2014, p. 19-42.
  • Nation and History. Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited with Peter Brock and John D. Stanley, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 493.
  • The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy, ed. M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula and Piotr J. Wróbel, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010, pp. 376.
  • “Foreshadowing the Holocaust: The Wars of 1914-1921 and Anti-Jewish Violence in Central and Eastern Europe,” in: Legacies of Violence. Eastern Europe’s First World War, ed. Jochen Böhler, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Joachim von Puttkamer, Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2014, p. 169-208.