Antoni Porayski-Pomsta
I completed my undergraduate degree in history at Brasenose College, Oxford, before moving to Cambridge to do an MPhil and PhD. I am supervised by Hubertus Jahn.
My PhD dissertation explores the history of urban margins in late nineteenth-century Russian Poland. I study them as a nexus of interactions between the Russian imperial state (and especially the local capillaries of state power), Polish-speaking elites (by the 1880s, predominantly the self-conscious intelligentsia), the poor (constituted by impoverished artisans, the nascent working class, and rural migrants), and the physical environment of urban outskirts. In the broadest possible terms, I would like to explore how modernity was received, created, experienced, and altered in one of the borderlands of the Russian Empire.
European history, 1715-1890 (Paper 17)
ASEEES 2023, Philadelphia (December, 2023). Presentation: ‘Accelerating out of control: temporal topographies of the (sub)urban in fin-de-siècle Russian Poland’
Cambridge-EHESS, Paris 2023. Presentation on the current state of the PhD based on a draft chapter.
BASEES postgraduate workshop 2023. Presentation: 'Archival Research in Poland'
Confraternitas Historica postgraduate seminar 2023. Presentation: ‘Through violence to eternal kingdom: Rewolucjoniści Mściciele, suburban violence, and the crisis of imperial governance in post-1905 Russian Poland’
ASEEES 2022, Chicago (November 2022). I will present as part of a panel: ‘Managing marginality: Russian imperial state and its borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century. Presentation title: ‘Governance of urban outskirts in late nineteenth century Russian Poland (c. 1880-1914)’
ASEEES 2022, online conference (October 2022). I will chair a roundtable 'Socialist Encounters at the Interfaces of the Russian and Ottoman Worlds'.
BASEES Polish Studies Group Conference 2022. Presentation title: ‘Plebeian sociability and the state in the urban outskirts of Russian Poland (1880-1915)’
Krúžok working group 2020 – an early career workshop in East and Central European History at Yale University, New Haven (2020-2021, conducted online). Presentation title: ‘Peasant experience of urban space in late nineteenth-century Poland’
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Key publications
Porayski-Pomsta, A.,‘Całkiem zwyczajny kraj i wyzwania historii ogólnych’, Praktyka Teoretyczna 46/4 (2022), pp. 251-7
Review essay: W. Marzec, Rising Subjects. The 1905 Revolution and the Origins of Modern Polish Politics (Pittsburgh, 2020), in Ab Imperio 23/1 (2022), pp. 270-4.