– was born in Chicago, Illinois, USA, to Polish war refugees. She graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C with a history major from the School of Foreign Service in 1984. She was a recipient of the Lady Davis Scholarship at the Hebrew University (1990-91), where she studied with Prof. Moshe Rosman (Bar Ilan University). She was the recipient of Fulbright, IREX, and Stefan Batory grants for archival research in Poland, Russia, and Belarus. She received her PhD from Georgetown University in 1998 under the mentorship of Prof. Andrzej Sulima Kamiński for her dissertation on the Polish-Muscovite War of 1654. Together with Prof. Karin Friedrich she co-edited Citizenship and Identity in a Multinational Commonwealth, a Festschrift dedicated to Prof. Kamiński and published by Brill Academic Publishers. Pendzich was a volunteer throughout the 1980s at the NSZZ “Solidarność” Coordinating Office Abroad headed by Jerzy Milewski in Brussels, Belgium. She was deputy director of the Institute for Civic Space and Public Policy at the Lazarski University in Warsaw. Pendzich worked in various capacities with the Bente Kahan Foundation in Wrocław in 2010-2017. She is currently working with the Department of Jewish Studies as an affiliated scholar.
bmpendzich[at]gmail.com