Historians in conversation - Prof. Paulina Kewes

How do historians build their career, what motivates them and how they deal with professional and personal challenges? What shapes their professional path? Dr Michael Green from the Faculty of Philosophy and History welcomes you to his podcast, where he will be inviting interesting guests to explore their stories.

Prof. Paulina Kewes, University of Oxford is a scholar of history of literature at Jesus College. In the conversation today, we discuss the role that family plays in developing the child’s interests, the impact of international family relations and eventually the steps that eventually led Prof. Kewes to a position at Oxford. She paints a fascinating picture of childhood in a mixed Russian Jewish-Polish family in Poland, the discovery of the Jewish origin of her father, and subsequent studies at the University of Gdansk during the 1980s, at the time of Martial Law in the country. We also discuss the new opportunities which appeared after the fall of communism and the college life in Oxford in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Among her publications:
Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Oxford, 1998).
“Translations of State: Ancient Rome and Late Elizabethan Political Thought”, Huntington Library Quarterly 83, 2020. 
“The State of Renaissance Studies: A World Well Lost?”, English Literary Renaissance 50 (2020), 76-82.