New Books in Polish Studies

This week on Democracy Dialogues, Frances Cayton speaks with four experts on Polish politics about the success of Poland’s opposition coalition in 2023, and the headwinds that democracy continues to face today.

What challenges do parties and civil society face in building pro-democracy electoral coalitions? If victorious, how do these challenges affect post-election governance and efforts at pursuing democratic renewal? This episode brings together politicians, political scientists, and civil society leaders who each played a critical role in the 2023 elections to examine what made Poland’s pro-democracy mobilization possible, the gains the 2023 coalition has achieved since entering power, and the challenges it continues to face in pursuing democratic renewal.This episode was originally recorded as a part of the Lessons from Global Democratic Resistance panel series. The series brings together frontline activists, civic leaders, institutional actors, and field‑informed scholars to examine how democratic actors have resisted, responded to, and learned from democratic backsliding across countries. The series aims to identify practical lessons and comparative insights for those defending democracy today and is organized in collaboration with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University; Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame; the Democratic Futures Project at the University of Virginia; Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mikołaj Cześnik, Director of the Institute of Social Science at SWPS University, Chairman of the Council of the Stefan Batory Foundation

Michał Wawrykiewicz, Member of the European Parliament (MEP). Co-Founder of the civic initiative Wolne Sady (Free Courts)

Marek Tatała, President and Co-Founder of the Economic Freedom Foundation

Dominika Lasota, Student and Activist in the Youth Climate Strike Poland, Co-Founder of Inicjatywa WSCHÓD

Frances Cayton is a PhD Candidate in Government at Cornell University. Her research focuses on questions surrounding democratic backsliding, civil society, and political communication.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s guest, Krzysztof Rowiński, is the author of Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film
(Routledge, 2026). This book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive
failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of
success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept
functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields.
Examining literature and film from mid- twentieth- century Poland,
Italy, and the United States, it traces productive effects of failure
which cannot survive into the future, yet have an important,
transformative impact in the moment in which they occur. The book
engages with the work of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno
Jasieński, proposing a theory of failure at the intersection of literary
study, performance theory, and political thought. In discussing these
examples, the book examines the place of failure in the broader context
of modern and contemporary US American, Italian, and Polish literary and
cultural traditions.

Because of its interdisciplinary potential, this study might appeal
to readers in art history, philosophy, political theory, and other
fields within the humanities and social sciences. Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption
offers a framework that could not only spotlight the contribution of
literary studies to the topic, in the form of narrative analysis but
also become part of the theoretical apparatus for further research in
these fields.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In BDSM Practices in Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), cultural anthropologist and cultural
studies scholar Jay Szpilka analyzes the way that BDSM is practiced in
contemporary Poland. Based on extensive field research, she asks what
social, cultural, and political conditions are necessary for BDSM to be possible to practice
in the first place. Through a nuanced analysis of the way that
practitioners navigate conflicting understandings and politics of kink,
this book provides an alternative to Western-centric narratives of BDSM
communities and challenges a number of long-standing notions about the
status kink which circulate in sexuality and queer studies.

Jay Szpilka is a visiting fellow at Edinburgh Napier University and
an assistant professor at SWPS University in Poland. She is the author
of BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland, and her work has been published in the Feminist Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Teksty Drugie, and the Australian Feminist Studies.

Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty (Lexington Books, 2024), Peter Dobek takes us into the daily life of the medieval tavern in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cracow. This is the ‘Golden Age’ of Poland Lithuania and the crepuscule between the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The taverns were the public space where different categories of people mixed: travelers, merchants, diplomats, clerics, prostitutes, gamblers, and rogues. This book a time machine: Dobek writes social history as attentive and detailed narrative. We learn about the economy of the petty entrepreneur, the special roles of Jews in medieval Poland, the gray areas where prostitution and gambling thrived. Dobek’s prose is lively, his research impressive, and his conclusions important.

Peter Dobek is a scholar of medieval Europe particularly medieval Poland with a focus on public houses (inns, taverns, and ale houses). He received his PhD from Western Michigan University in 2019. In addition to other publications, his book is the Public House in Central Europe.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A memoir of a child’s forced relocation to Siberia under Stalin’s
Gulag system reveals the potential for true human kindness in the face
of extraordinary hardship. 

In April of 1940, six-year-old Ida woke to the sound of pounding on
her door. Soviet soldiers forcibly packed her and her mother onto a
train with thousands of their neighbors and deported them to remote
Siberia, leaving them stranded to survive the brutal winter in subhuman
conditions. Looking back, Ida shares their struggles: foraging for food,
trying to reunite with her imprisoned father, spending weeks in a
desolate hospital with typhoid fever, and adapting to shifts in the
political climate to make the long journey home to Poland.

Ida published this acclaimed memoir in her native Polish in 2011.
Here, Ida’s granddaughter, Isabella Skrypczak, translates her babcia’s
words and provides additional context—including describing the
remarkable life Ida has gone on to live as a pioneering doctor.

In the vein of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile (Disruption Books, 2026) chronicles
Ida’s experiences on a lesser-known front of the Second World War.
Together, Ida and Isabella reflect on how every small act of kindness
contributed to Ida’s liberation from exile and ability to build a life
and a family. Her story celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to
not only survive trauma but thrive beyond it.Ida
Kinalska-Pietruska survived childhood exile to Siberia during the Soviet
Union’s World War II assault on Poland. When she returned to Poland as a
teen, she began studying medicine. A pioneering endocrinologist, she
founded the School of Endocrinology and Diabetology in Białystok and led
the region’s first endocrinology clinic for twenty years. Ida has
authored more than four hundred publications, mentored countless other
doctors, and collaborated across the international medical community,
including using her research to make widely known the Chernobyl
disaster’s effects on people’s endocrinological health. She has been
honored with the Order Odrodzenia Polski, Poland’s second-highest
civilian state award, and two Doctor Honoris Causa titles, reflecting
her resilience, brilliance, and global impact on science and humanity.Isabella Skrypczak
is an author, intuitive healer, and former HR professional in Big Tech
whose work bridges the seen and unseen. Born to Polish immigrants and
raised in Houston, Texas, she spent every summer with her grandmother in
Poland. When her grandmother’s memoir gained national attention in
Polish media, Iza felt called to translate it into English—an act of
love, remembrance, and advocacy. As war returned to Eastern Europe, she
recognized the urgency in sharing this history with the Western world.
She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter, Kamila.Stephen Satkiewicz
is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational
Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military
History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian
and East European history. He is currently the Book Review Editor for Comparative Civilizations Review.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices