We are pleased to announce that Małgorzata Mazurek (Associate Professor of Polish Studies) will be the new Co-Deputy Director of our East Central European Center starting on July 1, 2026. Mazurek joined Columbia’s Department of History in 2014. She specializes in the modern history of Poland and East Central Europe, with a particular focus on the history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism, and articles on labor, consumption, and history of human and social sciences in twentieth-century East Central Europe.

Mazurek’s forthcoming book A Place for All to Prosper: How Development Economics Emerged in Twentieth-Century Poland (Cornell University Press, 2026) revises the history of developmental thinking by centering Poland as the locality of innovations in economic thought in the twentieth century world. It investigates the role of Warsaw-based social scientists in shaping Eastern and Central European debates on mass migration and capitalism and further, in transforming this locally produced knowledge into policies for the developing world during the Cold War.

Join us in welcoming Małgorzata Mazurek! We look forward to seeing how her unique expertise and scholarly perspective will shape the East Central European Center.