Prof. Dariusz Gawin (1964),  historian of ideas, publicist. Head of the Civil Society Department at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw). Deputy Director of Warsaw Rising Museum. His research interests are in history of Polish political and social thought, political philosophy, history of polish democratic opposition. He recently published   Wielki zwrot. Ewolucja lewicy I odrodzenie idei społeczeństwa obywatelskiego 1956-1976 (U-turn. Evolution of the left and revival of the idea of civil society 1956-1976).

Dr Jim Bjork is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at King’s College London, where he has worked since 2005.  He previously taught at the Universities of Notre Dame, Rice, and Colgate and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Georgetown and Cornell Universities.  He received his PhD from the University of Chicago.  His book, Neither German nor Pole:  Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2008 and received the Kulczycki Prize in 2010.  His current research is focused on the local, national and transnational dimensions of Catholicism in Poland after the Second World War and will be culminating in a book provisionally titled True Poles:  Making Poland Catholic, 1945-70.