A conference Jan. 20-21 (Friday-Saturday) in McKenna Hall at Notre Dame will honor the University’s world-renowned scholar of Russian history, Andrzej Walicki, on his 75th birthday.
Titled “Ideas and Power in Modern Europe: A Conference in Honor of Andrzej Walicki,” the two-day conference will include presentations by eminent scholars whose work bears upon Walicki’s major intellectual interests: the history of 19th-century Russian and Polish social thought, the history of Marxism and the history of modern liberalism.
Prior to his appointment at Notre Dame in 1986, Walicki, a native of Warsaw, Poland, served as head of the Department of Modern Polish Philosophy and Social Thought at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology in the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was elected full member of the academy in 1998.
Walicki is the author of 12 books including “Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: the Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia,” which won the Vucinich Prize for best book in Slavic Studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. In 1998, the Italian government awarded Walicki the International Balzan Prize in History for lifetime achievement in scholarship. He is the only Notre Dame faculty member ever to receive the award.
The O’Neill Family Professor Emeritus of History, Walicki retired in 1999 but continues working on a comprehensive history of national ideologies in partitioned Poland and on a monograph on the responses to Catholicism in 19th-century Russian thought.
The conference is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Department of History, Henkels Lecture Series/ISLA, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Program in Russian and East European Studies.
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on January 12, 2006.