Associate Professor,
Early Modern European Art and Material Cultures
PhD, McGill University
MRes, European University Institute
BA, MA, University College London
On research leave during the academic year 2024/25
Contact via email: tomaszgrusiecki@boisestate.edu
Tomasz Grusiecki teaches courses on the history of visual and material culture in Europe and the wider world from 1500 through 1700, a period that is now often described as early modernity. Inquiring into the origins of modernity and how it changed our ideas about what it means to be a human being, an individual, and a citizen, these courses engage students with critical theories and debates to help them historicize today’s forms of visual representation, from selfies and cat videos to fashion and billboards.
His primary field of research is the visual and material culture of the early modern period, with an emphasis on Germanic and Slavonic Europe, but he ventures out into the modern period to provide a longue-durée perspective on this region. He focuses on topics that connect past and present, including myths of cultural distinctiveness, cultural entanglement, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities. His first monograph, Transcultural Things and the Spectre of Orientalism in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania, was published by Manchester University Press in 2023. He is currently working on his second book, which aims to be the first ecocritical examination of art and material culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lithuania, Poland, Prussia, and Rus’.
Dr Grusiecki has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Getty Research Institute, the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), the Central European University Budapest Foundation, and the Newberry Library. He was the 2023 recipient of the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, awarded by the College Art Association (CAA). In December 2023, he was elected President-Elect of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA).
You can see the full list of his publications here.
His CV is available here.
Recent projects
- Connected Central European Worlds, 1500–1700 (2021–2023; AHRC networking grant)
- From Kyivan Rus’ to Modern Ukraine: Virtual Conversations on History, Art, and Cultural Heritage (2022; a year-long public lecture and roundtable series organised by Dumbarton Oaks; Connected Central European Worlds; and North of Byzantium)
