All Episodes

Peter Paul Dobek, "The Public House in Central Europe: Inns, Tavern, and Alehouses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Dynasty" (Lexington Books, 2024)

Ida Kinalska-Pietruska and Isabella Skrypczak, "A Polish Girl in Siberia: Surviving and Transcending Exile" (Disruption Books, 2026)

Karolina Przewrocka-Aderet, "Polanim: From Poland to Israel" (Academic Studies Press, 2026)

Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)

Elizabeth R. Hyman, "The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising" (Harper, 2025)

Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, "Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48" (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Edward Luce, "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Darius Von Guttner-Sporzynski, "The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy" (Brepols, 2024)

Jan Borowicz, "Perverse Memory and the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Polish Bystanders" (Routledge, 2024)

Alex Storozynski, "Spies In My Blood: A Polish Family’s Secret Fight Against Nazis & Communists" (Polestar-Media, 2025)

Charlie English, "The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War" (Random House, 2025)

Catching the China-Europe Express: Logistics, Local Agency & Eurasian Geopolitics in the Polish Borderlands

David G. Williamson, "Poland Betrayed: The Nazi-Soviet Invasions of 1939" (Pen & Sword, 2011)

Peter Whitewood, "The Soviet-Polish War and its Legacy: Lenin’s Defeat and the Rise of Stalinism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025)

Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)

Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle

Ewa Stańczyk, "Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland" (U Press of Mississippi, 2024)

Joanna Mizielińska, "Queer Kinship on the Edge?: Families of Choice in Poland" (Routledge, 2024)

Zygmunt Bauman, "Theory and Society" (Polity, 2024)

Jacob Flaws, "Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Cristina Vatulescu, "Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Krzysztof Bielawski, "The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

Janusz Korczak, "How to Love a Child and Other Selected Works" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018)

Rachel O'Sullivan, "Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Nick Lloyd, "The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Norton, 2024)

Waitman Wade Beorn, "Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

David M. Driesen, "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Jack Palmer, "Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

What is Going on with Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?

Adam Zamoyski, "Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess" (William Collins, 2024)

Janine P. Holc, "The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust" (Brandeis UP, 2023)

Ewa K. Bacon, "Saving Lives in Auschwitz: The Prisoners’ Hospital in Buna-Monowitz" (Purdue UP, 2017)

William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Glenn Dynner, "The Light of Learning: Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Judy Batalion, "The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos" (William Morrow, 2021)

Jan Grabowski, "On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust" (Yad Vashem, 2024)

Adi Mahalel, "The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism" (SUNY Press, 2023)

Agnieszka Pasieka and Paweł Rodak, "Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters" (U Rochester Press, 2023)

"The US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Jessica C. Robbins, "Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

Maria Snegovaya, "When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Why Should We Preserve Memory of the Holocaust?

Alexej Lochmatow, "Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland: Scholarly Battles and the Clash of Virtues, 1945–1956" (Routledge, 2023)

Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, "The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

Sarah A. Cramsey, "Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946" (Indiana UP, 2023)

Roman Dziarski, "How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis: The True Story of the Holocaust Rescuers, Zofia Sterner and Her Family" (Academic Studies, 2024)

Serhiy Bilenky, "Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine Between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019

Magda Stroińska, "My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes" (Durvile, 2023)

Is Poland Back on Track? The Challenges for the New Government

The Idea of "Central Europe" from Naumann to Kundera

Agata Fijalkowski, "Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial" (Routledge, 2023)

Martyn C. Rady, "The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe" (Basic Books, 2023)

Malgorzata Fidelis, "Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Katarzyna Person and Johannes-Dieter Steinert, "Przemysłowa Concentration Camp: The Camp, the Children, the Trials" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

A Better Way to Buy Books

Nancy Sinkoff, "From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History" (Wayne State UP, 2020)

Jacob Mikanowski, "Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land" (Pantheon Books, 2023)

Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, "Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Jane Rogoyska, "Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth" (Oneworld, 2021)

Anna Müller, "An Ordinary Life?: The Journeys of Tonia Lechtman, 1918-1996" (Ohio UP, 2023)

Randy Grigsby, "A Train to Palestine: The Tehran Children, Anders' Army and Their Escape from Stalin's Siberia, 1939-1943" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019)

Benjamin Balint, "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" (Norton, 2023)

The Future of Eastern Europe: A Discussion with Zsuzsanna Szelényi

Piotr M. A. Cywiński, "Auschwitz: A Monograph on the Human" (Muzeum Auschwitz, 2022)

Helene J. Sinnreich, "The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Suzanna Eibuszyc, "Memory Is Our Home: Loss and Remembering--Three Generations in Poland and Russia 1917-1960s" (Ibidem, 2022)

Philip W. Blood, "Birds of Prey: Hitler's Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers, and the Holocaust in Poland" (Ibidem Press, 2021)

Kyrill Kunakhovich, "Communism's Public Sphere: Culture As Politics in Cold War Poland and East Germany" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Elżbieta Janicka and Michael Steinlauf, "This Was Not America: A Wrangle Through Jewish-Polish-American History" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022)

Geneviève Zubrzycki, "Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Michael Fleming, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

The Future of the European Left

Kenneth B. Moss, "An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland" (Harvard UP, 2021)

James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Jay Michaelson, "The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Eli Gumener, "A Ukrainian Chapter: A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir Of Sorrow" (Slavica, 2022)

Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe

Ewa Stańczyk, "Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

Caroline Boggis-Rolfe, "The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples" (Amberley, 2019)

The Future of the European Union: A Discussion with Luuk van Middelaar

Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, "Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu, "Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)

Joshua D. Zimmerman, "Jozef Pilsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Ukrainian Nationalism in Historical Context

Menachem Kaiser, "Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure" (Mariner Books, 2021)

Tomek Jankowski, "Eastern Europe!: Everything You Need to Know about the History (and More) of a Region That Shaped Our World and Still Does" (New Europe, 2021)

Yechiel Weizman, "Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust" (Cornell UP, 2022)

K. Friedla and M. Nesselrodt, "Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival" (Academic Studies Press, 2021)

Piotr H. Kosicki, "Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956" (Yale UP, 2018)

Stanley Bill, "Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Jochen Lingelbach, "On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War" (Berghahn Books, 2020)

Piotr Puchalski, "Poland in a Colonial World-Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939" (Routledge, 2021)

Joanna Mishtal, "The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland" (Ohio UP, 2015)

Lynn Garafola, "La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Jadwiga Biskupska, "Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Joanna Sliwa, "Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

Exploring Autonomy: A History of Jewish Self-Governance in Eastern Europe

Ola Hnatiuk, "Courage and Fear" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2019)

Paweł Markiewicz, "Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II" (Purdue UP, 2021)

Anat Plocker, "The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland: Memory Wars and Homeland Anxieties" (Indiana UP, 2022)

Izabela Wagner, "Bauman: A Biography" (Polity, 2020)

Anna Machcewicz, "Civility in Uncivil Times: Kazimierz Moczarski's Quiet Battle for Truth, from the Polish Underground to Stalinist Prison" (Peter Lang, 2020)

Andrew Demshuk, "Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, "Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

Machteld Venken, "Peripheries at the Centre: Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe" (Berghahn Books, 2021)

Eunice Blavascunas, "Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe's Last Primeval Forest" (Indiana UP, 2020)

Eliyana R. Adler, "Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Patrice M. Dabrowski, "The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine" (Northern Illinois UP, 2021)

Tímea Drinóczi and Agnieszka Bień-Kacała, "Illiberal Constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary" (Routledge, 2021)

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, "Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)

Mariusz Kalczewiak, "Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture" (U Alabama Press, 2019)

Natalia Aleksiun, "Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust" (Littman Library, 2021)

Katarzyna Person, "Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation" (Cornell UP, 2021)

Svenja Bethke, "Dance on the Razor's Edge: Crime and Punishment in the Nazi Ghettos" (U Toronto Press, 2021)

Dana Mills, "Rosa Luxemburg" (Reaktion Books, 2020)

Agnieszka Kościańska, "Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland" (Indiana UP, 2021)

Naomi Seidman, "Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition" (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019)

Max Gross, "The Lost Shtetl" (HarperCollins, 2020)

Łukasz Stanek, "Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Andrea Bohlman, "Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Kathryn Ciancia, "On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio, "Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019

David Nasaw, "The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War" (Penguin, 2020)

M. Wodziński and W. Spallek, "Historical Atlas of Hasidism" (Princeton UP, 2018)

Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Marlene Wind, "The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values" (Polity, 2020)

Adam Teller, "Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 17th Century" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020)

Gabriel Finder, "Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland" (U Toronto Press, 2018)

Steven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

T. Troianowska and A. Polakowska, "Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918" (U Toronto Press, 2018)