Professor Agnieszka Kościańska

Agnieszka Kościańska is Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at University of Warsaw. In 2021 and 2022, she was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, sexual violence, religion, and racism. In 2022-2024 she was the International co-Investigator in “Gender Wars: East and South” (PI Nicolette Makovicky) funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council and in 2020-2023 the Principal Investigator in “Catholicising Reproduction, Reproducing Catholicism: Activist Practices and Intimate Negotiations in Poland, 1930-Present” funded by the National Science Center Poland. Professor Kościańska is the author of Odejdź. Rzecz o polskim rasizmie (Go Away: On Polish Racism, with Michał Petryk, 2022, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej), To See a Moose. The History of Polish Sex Education (Berghahn Books, 2021, Polish edition Czarne 2017), Gender, Pleasure and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (Indiana University Press 2021, Polish edition Warsaw University Press 2014), Potęga ciszy (The Power of silence, Warsaw University Press, 2009) and (co-)editor of several volumes and journal special issues on gender and sexuality – the most recent being in English The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe (with Anita Kurimay, Kateřina Lišková, and Hadley Z. Renkin, 2025); in Polish Odmieńczość. Obywatelstwo seksualne i archiwum (with Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta, University of Warsaw Press, 2024). Her work appeared in journals such as Social Research: An International Quarterly, Medical Humanities, Journal of Religious History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Ethnologia Europaea, Focaal. European Journal of Anthropology, Sexualities, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. She also presented her work in non-academic formats. For instance, during her residency at Edinburgh College of Art in 2017 together with the artist Benny Nemer, she worked on a performance installation based on her research materials (letters to sexologists sent by Polish LGBTQ persons). The performance “You, dear Doctor, are my only rescue!” has been staged five times, in the UK, Poland, and the Czech Republic.