Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor, Russian and East European History, University of Texas-Arlington

Expert Bio

Patryk Babiracki is an assistant professor in Russian and East European history at the University of Texas-Arlington. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2008 and in 2008-9 taught at the University College Dublin. His research concentrates on transnational dimensions of Soviet and East European communisms during the Cold War. In 2010 Patryk was a Józef Tischner Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Most recently, he was also awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Central European University in Budapest, and a Volkswagen-Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship to be undertaken at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. Currently Patryk is working on a monograph entitled Soviet Soft Power and the Poles: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds in Stalin’s New Empire, 1943-1957. At the Kennan Institute he is focusing on the final chapter of the book, which examines broadly-understood cultural cooperation between the USSR and Poland in the immediate post-Stalin years. He is also co-editing a volume of essays entitled Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange in the Soviet Bloc, 1940s-1960s to be published with Texas A&M University Press.

Wilson Center Project

"Soviet Soft Power and the Poles: The Battle for Hearts and Minds in Stalin's New Empire, 1943-1957"