University of Warsaw joins Refo500

28-11-2011

The university of Warsaw is well known for her high-quality academic programs in humanities and expects to strengthen these programs as well as initiate new ones through the academic network Refo500 offers. Jerzy Axer on the new partnership:

'I hope that this cooperation will be mutually beneficial and will integrate Reformation research conducted in Western Europe and North America with very intensive research activities in Central and Eastern Europe. The cultural achievements and religious experiences of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are the common heritage of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Belarus. This heritage is not explored enough in contemporary research activities as a multicultural and multiconfessional experience of European culture. Such research is very important for the enlarged European Union and should be a valuable academic and civic experience.'

Since there is a growing interest in central Europe for the projects of Refo500 as for Reformation and Renaissance studies, the University of Warsaw decided to play a coordinating role in these developments in the person of Prof. Dr. Piotr Wilczek, Head of the Collegium Artes Liberales, Chair of the Committee on the Study of the Reformation in Poland and East-Central Europe and board member of RefoRC, the academic department of Refo500. According to Dr. Herman Selderhuis, director of Refo500, the participation of Warsaw underlines the conviction that the Reformation itself as well as research in the cultural, political, religious and academic changes in the 16th Century have as much a national as an European dimension.

Photo visual: Main gate of the University of Warsaw, ©The University of Warsaw Promotion Office.