Professor Michael Fleming is a graduate of the University of London and the University of Oxford. He completed his doctoral research at the University of Oxford, including a year affiliated to the University of Warsaw. He has since taught at Jesus College and Pembroke College, Oxford, and at the Academy of Humanities and Economics, Łódź. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Pułtusk School of Humanities and at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He is currently a professor at the Polish University Abroad, London, and conference secretary to the Institute for Polish Jewish Studies. In 2011, he was awarded the Aquila Polonica Prize. Fleming is the author of Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944-€“1950 (2010) and many articles examining twentieth-century history.

Doctor Wojtek Rappak was born in Gdańsk and studied philosophy and history in Canada, Warsaw, Paris and London.  He has a doctorate from the University of London for research into the foundations of logic and the early philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  He is also a Reader in history in the Institute of European Culture at the London-based Polish University Abroad (PUNO).  He is currently completing a post-doctoral history research project at University College London (UCL) on Jan Karski.

Taking Jan Karski’s life as a focal point, Dr Rappak’s research examines the archival evidence on how the Polish wartime state, through Karski, tried to alert the Allies about the situation in occupied Poland, about the Holocaust and on whether the Allies had the will or the capability to provide rescue.  His research also looks at the way Karski is remembered and memorialised today.

Dr Rappak has published and presented papers (in both Polish and English) on Jan Karski at conferences and seminars in London, Chicago, Jerusalem and in Poland.