– (PhD Warsaw) is a historian and sociologist. He received his doctorate from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. In his doctoral dissertation he studied patterns of socialisation and political consciousness of the Jewish youth in Interwar Poland. His research interests are: Jewish history in Eastern-Central Europe in the second half of 19th and 20th centuries, relations between social theory, political, social and cultural history, as well as the history of Zionism and the Jewish community of Eretz Israel/Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries.
During his doctoral studies he held fellowships at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv University, University of Haifa and at University College London. In the academic year 2014-2015 he was the Prins Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York, and the Sosland Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. In 2016 he held a post-doctoral fellowship at Imre Kertesz Kolleg at the University of Jena.
In the years 2013-2015 he participated in an international research project “Pogroms. Collective Anti-Jewish Violence in the Polish Lands in the 19th and 20th centuries: History, Memory, Identity.” In the year 2015-2016 he received a research grant from the Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture for the research concerning the Jewish community in Lower Silesia after 1945 and its relations with the Centres of the Jewish world. In the years 2016-2019 he has been participating in two research grants. The first one, ”Collective memory of ‘familiar other’ ethnicities in the urban environment: Case study of socio-political transformation and its impact on collective memory of Polish-Jewish and Polish-German relations in two Polish towns”, is funded by the Polish National Science Center (NCN) and the German Research Society (DFG), and carried out by the University of Wrocław and Nord-Ost Institut of the Hamburg University. The other, “Inclusion of the Jewish Population into Post-war Czechoslovak and Polish Societies,” has been funded by the Czech Science Foundation and carried out by the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Science.
In 2016 he received the first prize in the Mayer Balaban competition for the best dissertation in Polish-Jewish Studies as well as a scholarship from the Minister of Higher Education for Exceptional Young Scholars.
In 2018, he was awarded first prize in a competition for the best academic publication on the subject “Jews and Liberal Regimes in Eastern Europe after 1917,” awarded by the Leonid Nevzlin Center for Research on the Russian and Eastern European Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the monograph Dzieci modernizmu. Świadomość, kultura i socjalizacja polityczna młodzieży żydowskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej (Children of Modernism. Awareness, Culture and Political Socialization of Jewish Youth in the Second Polish Republic). Kijek also received a prize from the President of the University of Wrocław for outstanding academic achievements.
He is currently heading a research grant from the National Science Center (2019-2021) entitled “The Last Polish Shtetl? the Dzierżoniów Jewish Community, Jewish World, the Cold War and Communism (1945-1950);” he is on the academic council of the research project “Migration and Holocaust: Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s)” funded by the European Research Council program and conducted by the École normale supérieure (Paris); and he is also the recipient of a scholarship from the Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies.
kamil.kijek[at]gmail.com