Biography

Paulina Dominik works at the intersection of global history and area studies. She earned her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin where she was a doctoral fellow at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History. She received her BA and MSt in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

Her research interests include the history of imperialism and nationalism, the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Mediterranean, entanglements between Central-Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Polish political emigration in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and the history of Orientalism.

As a Max Weber Fellow, Paulina is working on her first monograph, titled ‘Poland and the Muslim World during the Age of Empire: A Global Biography of Seyfeddin Thadée Gasztowtt’. This project examines the emergence and dissemination of anti-imperial discourses and critiques of a Eurocentric world order. It explores the cross-cultural transfer of ideas between Central-Eastern Europe and the Middle East through the biography of a Polish-French activist based in the Ottoman Empire and its former provinces in North Africa in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

At the EUI, Paulina is also developing a postdoctoral project that focuses on Polish imperial thought and the practices of informal imperialism after the dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795.

Paulina has mentored undergraduate students in global history and the history of the Ottoman Empire and co-taught a graduate seminar on informal empire.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

Ongoing

• Eastern Europe as Laboratory of Change

Completed

• Decentering Eurocentrism