Research
Dr Stanley Bill is a Cambridge Early Career Fellow and will be at CRASSH in Michaelmas Term 2019.
During my term at CRASSH, I will be researching the structure and origins of contemporary populist discourse in Poland in the terms of postcolonial theory. I am interested in the ways in which certain political actors in Poland have constructed varieties of populist discourse couched in the language of a very specific national-conservative postcolonial narrative. I am provisionally referring to this mixed discourse as ‘postcolonial populist discourse’ or ‘periphery populist discourse’. This discourse currently constitutes a highly effective political narrative, but I will also be examining whether it reflects certain recurring structures of political contestation in a peripheral or semi-peripheral country with a modern history of foreign domination. Finally, I will ask whether ‘periphery populism’ might represent a distinct sub-category of populist discourse.
About
Stanley Bill is University Senior Lecturer in Polish Studies at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Cambridge. He works largely on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, with particular interests in the poetics of the body, religion and secularisation, Polish-Ukrainian relations, and postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural and political history. He has published widely on Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, postcolonial theory in the Polish context, legacies of Polish Romanticism, as well as on religious problems in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is also co-editor of the news and opinion website and social media hub ‘Notes from Poland’.
