Historian, professor and deputy director for research at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His interests include the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of science. He has written about Marxist-Leninist historiographies of the region after 1945, about the involvement of scholars in politics and politics in scholarship, as well as about memory.

From 2006 to 2010 he worked at the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He is a member of the editorial boards of “Střed/Centre. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries”, “Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung”, “Česko-Slovenská Historická Ročenka” and “Soudobé Dějiny / Czech Journal of Contemporary History”, and a member of the academic council of “Acta Poloniae Historica”.

As a science communicator he appears in radio programmes and publishes in socio-cultural press outlets such as “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Gazeta Wyborcza” and “Polityka”. He has devoted two books to science communication: “Polska bez cudów. Historia dla dorosłych” (Poland Without Miracles. History for Adults, 2021, awarded the Polityka Prize in 2022) and “Historia głupich idei. Duch narodu w świątyni nauki” (A History of Stupid Ideas. The Spirit of the Nation in the Temple of Science, 2022).

His major publications include “Przede wszystkim ma być naród. Marksistowskie historiografie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej” (The Nation Above All. Marxist Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe, 2007; German edition 2011, English 2013, Czech 2024) and “Wielka Wojna profesorów. Nauki o człowieku (1912–1923)” (The Great War of the Professors. Human Sciences, 1912–1923, 2014; English edition 2019, Russian 2021). Together with Włodzimierz Borodziej he published a history of the “long” First World War in Central and Eastern Europe (“Nasza wojna”, Our War, vols I–II, Warsaw 2014–18 and 2021; German edition 2018, English 2021 and 2023). Most recently he published “Drawing Fatherlands: Geographers and Borders in Inter-War Europe” (2022).