Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL)

Visiting Fellow

Duration of Stay: July 2022

Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski is Professor of Polish-Lithuanian History and Head of Research at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London (UCL). He will be a visiting fellow at the ScienceCampus, based at IOS, throughout July 2022. He received his BA and MA from Cambridge, before gaining a PhD at Oxford and a habilitation degree from the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). He moved to UCL-SSEES from Belfast in 2005 and was made professor in 2013. He is a specialist in the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with his most recent book The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1733–1795: Light and Flame, published by Yale University Press in 2020.

He has also published the monograph The Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1788–92: A Political History, published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Its principal aim was to establish why certain decisions were made by a parliamentary assembly in a republican political culture, while others, which at the time seemed equally plausible, were not. It explains how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went to the verge of schism with the Holy Apostolic See, before the negotiation of a face-saving compromise. His broader research interests take in the Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in broader contexts as well.

On 7 July, at 14:15 in 017 at IOS/Graduate School in Altes Finanzamt, he will give a lecture titled Poland-Lithuania in the Age of the Atlantic Revolution as part of the Research Colloquium.