The activities of the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIASt) focuses on the promotion of scientific and intellectual exchange as well as the creation of an international and interdisciplinary community consisting of researchers who come together up for the academic year in order to discuss and exchange views. Scholarship holders, exempted from teaching and administrative obligations, will be able to continue their own projects in an international scientific environment that stimulates debate and innovation.
I took my BA, MA and Ph.D. at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and I also held a research fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research from 1974-6. My thesis was on Avitus of Vienne: Avitus was a bishop and writer of importance in the late fifth and early sixth century, and he has left us with an important dossier of letters and poems which are central to an understanding of the culture of the post Roman West from 470-530.
PD Dr. Michael G. Esch, studied History and German Philology in Düsseldorf and Warsaw. In 1996, he obtained his doctoral degree with a comparative study of German and Polish population policies 1939-1950. In 2008 he was habilitated after a study about migrants from eastern Europe in Paris 1880-1940. He has worked extensively on different topics of European Social and Cultural History in the 19th and 20th centuries, namely different aspects of migration history and of popular culture in transnational perspective.
