Dr. Łukasz Bukowiecki holds an MA and PhD in cultural studies. He is Assistant Professor and the Head of cultural studies and social arts program at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw (UW), Poland. His academic interests focus on the social construction of heritage, cultural history of museum collections and concepts, and urban memory and imaginary in the Baltic Sea region.
In 2015 he published a book on the cultural history and social function of open-air museums in Sweden and Poland Czas przeszły zatrzymany [The past arrested]. His second book, Muzea-preteksty. Niezrealizowane przedsięwzięcia muzealne wobec negatywnego dziedzictwa w Warszawie [Museums-pretexts: Unimplemented museum projects and negative heritage in Warsaw], based on his PhD dissertation, was awarded the Best Book in Polish Memory Studies Award in 2022 by the Polish Memory Studies Group of the international Memory Studies Association. In his latest book, Nieodbudowany. Spór o Zamek Królewski w Warszawie 1945–1971 [Unrebuilt. Dispute on the Royal Castle in Warsaw 1945–1971], he traces unimplemented concepts of the postwar reconstruction of the former royal residence in Poland’s capital, destroyed during the WW2, that emerged during political, professional and social discussions in the late 1940s., 1950s and 1960s in Poland.
From 2018 to 2021 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Research on Social Memory at the Faculty of Sociology (UW), supporting the work package City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts within the frames of the Horizon 2020 project “European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities” (ECHOES). Since 2021 he has been employed as a researcher in the project “Social Memory and the Post-Imperial Russian Heritage in Poland” (National Science Center, Poland). He has contributed articles to main Polish and some international academic journals, including Heritage & Society, Kultura Współczesna, Przegląd Humanistyczny, and Teksty Drugie.