Dear Sirs,
The team of the project “Biography and academic imagination. Polish intellectual diaspora in the autobiographies of migrant scholars” under the leadership of Dr. Hab. Kamil Łuczaj, kindly requests that people involved in academic activity share their private archives and biographical materials (diaries, memoirs, letters, emails, unpublished texts and memoirs, documents). We are primarily interested in private, unpublished sources regarding migration related to research work, to which we can gain access only thanks to your kindness and help. The project is financed by the National Science Center (2023/50/E/HS6/00189) at the University of Lodz.
The study focuses on the biographical experiences of scientists who left Poland for the US, UK, Canada or Australia for professional reasons, over the course of five decades: the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000-2009 and 2010-2019, i.e. in the period after March 1968 and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Our recruitment focuses on people whose period of academic migration “to the West” lasted at least two years in total, some of which took place in one of the above-mentioned Anglo-Saxon countries. At the same time, we are happy to include not only researchers who travelled abroad under contracts, permanent or temporary employment, but also those whose stays were of a doctoral nature (e.g. academic exchanges, scholarships, studies abroad). We are very keen to capture the broad spectrum of migration experiences of Polish scientists at all levels of their careers, within various disciplines and associated with various research centres, universities or non-governmental institutions. We encourage anyone interested in sharing their biography to contact us, regardless of their current professional status and current area of professionalisation. We treat the “intellectual diaspora” in the title of the project in an inclusive, multi-generational way, and without excluding people who are not currently employed at the university, but for whom research work has played a significant formative role, or is continued in another institutional environment, including commercial ones.
If any of you or your loved ones have such materials and would like to support our project, we would be very grateful for your contacting us at the following e-mail address: kamil.luczaj@eksoc.uni.lodz.pl All sources made available to us will be anonymised, and their use for future publications will be duly authorised.
As part of the study, we will also conduct biographical interviews – if any of you do not have records of your stays but would like to share your experiences verbally, we also invite you to contact us.
Best regards
Kamil Łuczaj
Małgorzata Łukianow
Katarzyna Krakowska
Emilia Sieczka