Richard Butterwick

Richard Butterwick is a Senior Lecturer (equivalent to associate professor) in Modern Polish History, at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. A specialist on Central and Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, he has two books and many articles and chapters to his name and has taught widely on the history of this region during an academic career in Oxford, Queen's University Belfast, and now at University College London.

Biography

He was born in March, 1968. Having realised while reading History at Queens' College, Cambridge (1986-89) that nirvana could be found in the study of the age of Mozart and Canova, his initial research was on the Anglophilia of the last King of Poland (Stanislaw August Poniatowski 1732-1798). This led to several years spent in Poland, first as a Polish Government scholar and later as a visiting lecturer at Łódź University. In the meantime Hertford College, Oxford, granted him the Mary Staruń scholarship in Polish Studies, so he left Cambridge for the Oxford, where his supervisor was R. J. W. Evans.

He was awarded a DPhil in Modern History in 1994 for his thesis 'Stanisław August Poniatowski, his Circle and English Political Culture'. A revised version was published by Oxford University Press in 1998 as "Poland's Last King and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski 1732-1798", named as an academic book of the year by Choice in 1999. An expanded Polish edition appeared under the auspices of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2000. He then held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford in 1994-97, which in 1995-97 was combined with a Research Fellowship at Wolfson College. In 1997 he was appointed Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen's University Belfast, where he co-founded the interdisciplinary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Dr Butterwick then moved to London to become Lecturer in Modern Polish History at SSEES in January 2005, Graduate Tutor in September 2005, and Senior Lecturer in September 2006, but he spends as much time as possible in Warsaw, Cracow, Vilnius and other parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Research interests

His research interests have widened to the Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment in Poland-Lithuania, c. 1730-c.1830, with a particular focus on contemporaries' attitudes to the 'age of Enlightenment', intellectual and cultural contacts with western Europe, such as the Polish reception of Montesquieu and Rousseau. A co-edited collection on Peripheries of the Enlightenment will appear in SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century) early in 2008. His personal contribution focuses on the sermons of two once famous Lithuanian preachers, in the borderlands 'between enlightened Catholicism and Anti-Enlightenment'. He is also currently shortening a lengthy monograph for Oxford University Press on the Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1788-92, and preparing a Polish edition of the opus monstrum for the Polish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

He has also developed his interest in monarchist thought and discourse in the challenging republican context of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, since hosting the 1999 Wiles Colloquium on The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy in European Context, c. 1500-1795. The revised proceedings were published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2001. His argument is for the importance of monarchist discourse in the Polish Revolution of 1788-92 in an article for the English Historical Review in 2005. At some point he intends to return to researching a book exploring issues of surrogate paternity and male friendship in mid-eighteenth-century Europe, approached via the relationships between the British diplomat and libertine poet Sir Charles Hanbury Williams (1708-59), the young Stanisław A. Poniatowski and the Grand Duchess Catherine II of Russia.

Source

* UCL SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES [http://www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/prospect/butterwick.htm]

Publications

* "Poland's Last King and English Culture: Stanislaw August Poniatowski, 1732-1798" ISBN13: 9780198207016 and ISBN10: 0198207018 (Hardback, 398 pages)

External links

* Book review by Dr Butterwick [http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/butterwickR.html]
* [http://www.maney.co.uk/search?fwaction=show&fwid=141]
* [http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/European/EasternEurope/?view=usa&ci=9780198207016]
* The American Historical Review [http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.3/br_186.html] and [http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.3/ess_41.html]
* Oxford University Press [http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780198207016]
* UCL SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON, 7TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE [http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~tjmsesm/Programme-at-a-glance-Saturday.htm]
*worldcat id|lccn-n97-75437