Tomasz Kamusella

I am an interdisciplinary historian of modern central and eastern Europe, with a focus on language politics and nationalism. In 2001 received a PhD in Political Science from the Institute of Western Affairs (Instytut Zachodni), Poznań, Poland. A decade later, in 2011, I obtained a Habilitation ('continental 2nd PhD') in Cultural Studies from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.

In the first decade of the 21st century I published several books on the history and politics of language in Upper Silesia and across central Europe. In 2007, the Purdue University Press (West Lafayette IN) brought out my doctoral monograph on how ethnic and national groups emerged in Silesia, between 1848 and 1918, from the early modern society of unequal estates. Two years later, in 2009, Palgrave published my highly-acclaimed work on how languages and nationalisms were constructed across modern central Europe, leading to the emergence of ethnolinguistic nation-states in this region. As a result, in central Europe, the nation is defined as all speakers of a language, for whom a state should be carved out with disregard for any historical borders or polities.

Historians treat language as a 'black box,' while linguists perceive languages as ahistorical entities. For both groups I wrote a brief monograph (Palgrave 2015) on how languages were constructed in line with political needs in Europe during the last millennium. I followed with another 'corrective' monograph (Palgrave 2017) on the nationally-induced anachronism of treating the early modern Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania as an 'early Poland,' or an 'early Lithuania.'

With scholars from Australia, Europe, Israel, Japan and Zimbabwe I co-edited volumes on the political and social history of languages in southern Africa (Pagrave 2018) and in Slavophone Europe (Palgrave 2016), alongside a volume on modernity and national identity in Upper Silesia (Routledge 2016). Recently, I published a monograph on the unduly forgotten 1989 ethnic cleansing of Bulgaria's Turks, which precipitated the end of communism in this country (Routledge 2018).

At present I work on Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe, the politics of the number of Slavic languages during the last two centuries, and the transfer of the idea of the ethnolinguistic nation state from central Europe to southeast Asia and Ethiopia.