Kathryn Ciancia is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. She is a historian of modern Eastern Europe, with a research focus on Poland in the first half of the twentieth century and received her PhD from Stanford University.
Her first book, On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (forthcoming in 2020), explores how after the end of the First World War, an eclectic group of Polish men and women—from border guards and urban planners to teachers and military settlers—attempted to modernize a poor, war-torn, and multiethnic eastern province. It shows how Polish “civilizers” developed increasingly radical demographic experiments prior to the Second World War.
A word from Leonora Neville, Chair of the History Department:
Professor Kathryn Ciancia is widely acclaimed as a rising star of modern Eastern European history. Drawing on sources in five languages from fourteen archives, Ciancia’s first book, On Civilization's Edge: Polish Borderland in the Interwar World (Oxford 2020) shows that elites from central Polish cities saw the work of integrating their eastern borderland into the new Polish state as a “civilizing mission,” akin to those their European contemporaries were pursuing in their colonies throughout the world. Both those Polish political leaders who wanted to craft an ethnically unified Polish state that would subordinate ethnic minorities, and those that advocated for a cosmopolitan state that would celebrate its “toleration” for minorities, saw their work as a matter of bringing “civilization” to an underdeveloped region. Ciancia is among the History Department’s most beloved teachers currently active. She received the Karen F. Johnson teaching award from the Department of History in 2018 and the Distinguished Honors Faculty Award from the College of Letters & Science, also in 2018. She inspires deep devotion in her students, who frequently describe her as one of the most caring professors they have had. We are thrilled to have Professor Ciancia in our community of historians.