Excellence Initiative - Research University

University Centre of Excellence IMSErt - Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments

Contactul. Fosa Staromiejska 3, 87-100 Toruń
tel.: +48 56 611 37 15
+48 516 638 621
e-mail: imsert@umk.pl

Head of the Center

Adam Kola from September 2019 till August 2020 was the Deputy Dean for International Cooperation, Organization, and Development of the Faculty of Humanities of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. In 2016-2019 he was the Deputy Dean for Organization and Development of the Faculty of Philology. Between 2011 and 2014, he was the Deputy Director of the Institute of Slavonic Philology at the same Faculty.

He is an assistant professor at the Laboratory for the Study of Collective Memory in Post-Communist Europe – POSTCOMER. In 2016-2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. Since 2019 he has been a member of the executive board of the International Comparative Literature Association.

Adam was also the Vice-President of the History Anthropology Section of the Polish Ethnological Society and is a member of the editorial committee of the “Projects of Comparative Literature” publishing series. (Universitas Publishing House, Krakow) and editorial offices of several journals (“Opera Slavica,” “Archive of Emigration”). He was also

the Head of the Training Department of the International Centre for Information Management (ICIMSS; 2009-2012), as well as the President of the Board of the Scientific Association Collegium Invisibile, Warsaw, Poland (both institutions are non-governmental organizations focused on scientific work).

He was visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute at the Columbia University in the City of New York (2009), but also at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (postdoc, the Czech Republic, 2007), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia, 2004), and Charles University in Prague (the Czech Republic, 2002-2003). Adam did archival researches in many European and American archives, just to mentioned a few of them: Columbia University (2009, 2014), Harvard University (2009, 2012), MIT (2009, 2012), Yale University (2012), and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda (Maryland, 2018).

In 2019 he was a participant in the “Leaders in University Management” course, University College London, UK (October), and in 2011 I attended the first session of the “Institute for World Literature” (Beijing, PRC), organized by Harvard University and Beijing University.

He is or was PI in several grants, just to mentioned two financed by National Science Centre, Poland (1) “Transligualism in Knowledge Transfer Process: the Case of Polish Intellectuals in the US, 2018-2019”; (2) “Millennium. Celebrating the anniversary of the baptism of Eastern and Central Europe”, 2019-2022; five different fellowships by the Foundation for Polish Science: twice Start in 2009, 2010, conference grant in 2010, Kwerenda in 2012 and Mentoring in 2012-2014; ERC Mentoring Initiative (2016-2017) organized by Institute for Human Sciences and Polish Academy of Sciences – Scientific Centre in Vienna, Austria; member of several grants as well as the recipient of research grants at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (2004, 2010, 2011, 2012).

His achievements and skills are confirmed by distinctions and awards – including some of the most prestigious in Polish science – like the Ministry of Science and Higher Education fellowship for outstanding young scholars (2012-2015) and the prestigious academic award of the “Polityka” weekly newsmagazine (2014).

He was a member of the organizing committee of the international conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) titled “Situating Solidarities: social challenges for science and technology studies,” Faculty of Humanities, NCU, Toruń, Poland, September 17-19, 2014, as well as about ten additional conferences, workshops and invited lectures.

Adam is an author of three books, editor of four additional volumes, and two special issues of academic journals (and one more book and an edited volume are in print). He is the author of about 100 articles in Polish, Czech, Russian, German and English, and does translations from Czech and English into Polish. What is even more essential and what is unusual in humanities, at least some of those works are co-authored with other scholars.

Website: https://adamkola.eu/