Courses for ERASMUS students (course group defined by Faculty of History)

Winter semester 2025/26

• Seminar - 10 hours

(in Polish) The course focuses on the role of religious imaginations and practices in ancient urbanism and such ‘urbanity’. How did religious rituals, festivals, and discourses make life bearable or enjoyable? How could people learn to deal with interpersonal relationships and the problems of subsistence or even affluence under such conditions? How did they experience the modes and frequency of encounters and make sense of it? Drawing on texts from the city of Rome, the course will try to reconstruct such experiences and strategies. By reading not just small particularly relevant passages but entire literary units, analysis will also address the questions of the role and position of the authors as observers and participants in urban discourse: How were these very texts engaged in the production of specific forms of urbanity and urban ethos? Whenever possible, the discussion will also allow to reflect on contemporary urban life in the light of ancient institutions and voices.

Summer semester 2025/26

• Lecture - 30 hours

Summer semester 2026/27

• Lecture - 30 hours

This lecture explores the Early Modern history of the Black Sea as a “historical meso-region,” following scholars like Braudel, Stoianovich, and Özveren. It examines how the Black Sea served as a crossroads of diplomacy, trade, and cultural exchange among major powers (Ottoman, Russian, Polish-Lithuanian, Swedish) and smaller entities (Circassians, Cossacks, Tatars, Moldavians, Wallachians). It highlights cross-border patronage networks that shaped regional policies and investigates social and ethnic relations—especially interactions between nobles, Jewish, Greek, and Armenian merchants, and serfs. Drawing on my ongoing archival research, the lecture reveals how political, social, and religious dynamics evolved from the 16th to the 18th century.

Winter semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 30 hours

Winter semester 2025/26

• Seminar - 30 hours

Winter semester 2026/27

• Seminar - 30 hours

This course is designed to transition you from being a consumer of historical and classics research to independently producing and presenting your original findings in the form of a structured text. The focus is on improving your ability to obtain, select, and organise information and to communicate it clearly and critically in various written formats, using the conventions of the studied disciplines.

Winter semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 30 hours

Winter semester 2025/26

• Seminar - 30 hours

Winter semester 2026/27

• Seminar - 30 hours

No brief description found, go to course home page to get more information.

Summer semester 2025/26

• Seminar - 30 hours

No brief description found, go to course home page to get more information.

Winter semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 30 hours

This course will present the history of vine and wine from Prehistory to the Byzantine times. It will concentrate on the origins of vine and wine in the Mediterranean and beyond as well as on social, cultural, religious and economic aspects of wine production, consumption and trading in different cultures.

Winter semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 15 hours

This module concerns the uses (and abuses) of legal evidence and will examine how we as late antique historians can use it. It will examine the different types of surviving legal evidence including law codes – both official like the Theodosian Code and unofficial like the Comparison of Roman and Mosaic Law – inscriptions such as Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, and imperial letters including those embedded in ecclesiastical histories and other correspondence . We will explore the gulf between rhetoric and reality, and the real life impacts these laws and collections had on the ancient world. We will also consider how this evidence has been used by scholars, and how we can therefore do history while using this evidence.

Summer semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 8 hours

It is the intention of the course to let students get to know developments in analysing ancient religion in its widest sense, that is, starting with ancient mythology and concluding with Christian hagiography. We will start with the myth of Perseus, which will introduce us to the problems of myth and ritual. Then we will look at the possible occurrence of atheism in classical Greece and the various approaches to it, starting a century ago, which will also introduce us into the debate whether the Greeks had a notion of belief. We will proceed by looking at an ancient horror story from the time of the Second Sophistic (second century AD), which will enable us to look at pagan and Christian ideas about the afterlife. We will conclude by taking a look at the Life of Hilarion, a kind of hagiographic biography.

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Course terms:

14 April 2025 13:15–14:45

15 April 2025 9:45–11:15; 13:15–14:45

16 April 2025 9:45–11:15

Summer semester 2025/26

• Seminar - 30 hours

Summer semester 2026/27

• Seminar - 30 hours

State-of-the art course on the most important aspects of imperial governance in the Persian Empire.

Summer semester 2025/26

• Seminar - 15 hours

The course lasts 15 hours (7 in-person sessions, 90 minutes each).

Schedule: Tuesdays, 4:45 – 6:30 p.m.

Dates: March 17 – May 5, 2026.

Summer semester 2026/27

• Seminar - 30 hours

No brief description found, go to course home page to get more information.

Summer semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 30 hours

The course will present the events of the period and day-to-day life in the territory of Judea-Palaestina, from before the Hasmonaean revolt in 167 BCE, to the end of the Second Jewish Revolt in 136 CE. During the course, the importance, and the richness of the archaeology in the region will be discussed and will be used as part of larger debates, like the shifts in Jewish religion and society, to Jewish-gentile relationships and the attitude of the Empires to their Jewish population, and vice versa. As part of the course, the students will learn archaeological methodologies that will enable them to understand the material and how to combine different sources to better understand antiquity.

Summer semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 30 hours

The course is an introduction to the most important problems of environmental history of the 20th century such as changes in agriculture, the burning of fossil fuels and the production of petrochemicals, industrial waste and nuclear waste, and anthropogenic transformation of landscapes.

Summer semester 2024/25

• Classes - 30 hours

Summer semester 2025/26

• Classes - 30 hours

Summer semester 2026/27

• Classes - 30 hours

The Early Modern travel accounts are a treasure trove of information on both the traveler himself/herself and the place he/she visited. Through the study of this genre of sources we are able to comprehend the conditions under which people traveled in early modern Europe, the reasons why they left home, and how they were changed by the experience. Our course would hopefully bring us closer to understanding the relationships the travelers formed on their journeys and their encounters with local societies. At the heart of this course, we will analyze a wide variety of accounts of the individuals, who travelled to and from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Early Modern Period. The primary sources analyzed during this course dates back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

Winter semester 2024/25

• Seminar - 30 hours

No brief description found, go to course home page to get more information.