Małgorzata Abassy is an Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, where she completed a Russian and Oriental philology (Iranian Studies) MA studies programmes. She obtained her PhD degree in the humanities from the Jagiellonian University. She holds the habilitation degree from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, the Department of Literature and Culture Studies.
Her research focuses on culture and literature studies, from cultural patterns and mentality perspective in the Post-Soviet and Central Asia area to the Caucasus as the Russian Empire’s frontier, with a particular emphasis on the 19th century Russia and contemporary Iran. Her areas of expertise include the history of intellectual and social elites, cultural codes transformation, Russia – the West and Iran – the West interactions, Russia’s expansion towards the Caucasus, Russian literature as reflection of social and cultural processes, great Russian writers’ legacy, theory of culture and cybernetics models of autonomous cultural systems, systems.
She is currently conducting research on : 1. social and political elites as culture-creating agents; 2. educational systems as an instrument of cultural engineering; 3. cultural codes and methods of their decoding and recoding; 4. Russia’s expansion towards the Caucasus, complexity in cultural systems.
She has authored over 70 articles and five books on Russia and Iran, in Polish, Russian and English. .
She led and contributed to the management of research projects, including the tutoring and supervision of students.. She was the project manager in the following projects: “Women’s entrepreneurship in the COVID-19 period in cultural perspective. The case of Russia”, “Dimensions of friendship: between heritage of the Jagiellonian University’s ethos and future of science”. She is also a member of the international research platform “Contested Legacies. Central/Eastern and Southern European competing narratives on authoritarian lieux de mémoire"”. She received several research internships: from Moscow University, Russia (2016) St. Petersburg University, Russia (2019), Heidelberg University, Germany (2018), Vienna University (2022). She is a member of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES, as of 2020) and the Societas Iranologica Europea (S.I.E, as of 2011).
Abassy has contributed to the success of PhD students as the supervisor of PhD theses. She is a recipient of the Medal of Merit for Contribution to the Polish Science by the President of Poland, and several awards received from the Rector of the Jagiellonian University.
As of 2020 she has held a managerial position of the Head of the Institute of Russian and East European Studies at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University.
Contact: malgorzata.abassy@uj.edu.pl