Kamil Ruszała, PhD

Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Dr Kamil Ruszała is an Assistant Professor of Modern History at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He studied at Jagiellonian University, University of Vienna and Charles University. His research focuses on the history of East-Central Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the First World War, the anthropology of war, WW1 refugees and refugee camps, war violence, post-imperial transformations, borders & population control, WW1 sites of memory and commemoration. He is the PI of research projects focusing on refugee history, the First World War, and biopolitics (within the Kraków–Berlin–Vienna consortium: Empire and Environment: Militarized Refugees’ Bodies and Environments in WWI Eastern Europe), as well as on First World War commemoration and heritage (CHSH: Heritage of War 1914–1918). He is a member of several international research networks on migration, displacement, and war experiences, and acts as Managing Editor of 1914–1918-Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. He has held visiting research and teaching fellowships in Paris (2019), Chicago (2020), Buffalo, NY (2021), Antwerp (2021), Rome (2022), the IWM-Vienna (2022/2023), Copenhagen (2023), Berlin (2025) and Konstanz (2026).

For more information, see the Institute of History, Jagiellonian University website.

Statement of interest:

I am a historian working on war and East Central Europe, with particular focus to the First World War. My current research explores the concept of imperial bodies – the ways bodies were constructed, categorised, and politically appropriated during the war and its postwar aftermath. Civilian and military bodies alike are treated as sites where imperial and post-imperial power was exercised, contested, and transformed.

One strand of this research examines the bodies of refugees in and beyond camps in the Habsburg Monarchy. I look at camps as spaces where state power, humanitarian governance, and social control intersected with refugee agency, paying particular attention to resilience and to how the body, the state, nationality, belonging, and citizenship were renegotiated through the camp experience.

A second strand turns to the military and commemorative dimensions of the post-imperial transition – specifically, the nationalisation and political instrumentalisation of the Habsburg fallen soldiers after 1918. Soldiers who had died within a multinational imperial framework, along with their burial places, became objects of competing national memory regimes after the Monarchy’s collapse, retrospectively recast as national heroes, martyrs, or victims through narratives and commemorative architecture that served distinct political ends. Drawing on the cultural history of war, landscape anthropology, and memory studies, I trace how these imperial commemorative landscapes were reinterpreted after 1918 and absorbed into new national narratives.

Selected Publications:

• Ruszała, Kamil, ed. Monuments and Cemeteries of the First World War in Europe: Toward a Transnational History. History of Warfare Series. Leiden: Brill, 2026.
• Ruszała, Kamil, ed. Refugees and Population Transfer Management in Europe, 1914–1920s. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2024.
• Pudłocki, Tomasz, and Kamil Ruszała, eds. Postwar Continuity and New Challenges in Central Europe, 1918–1923: The War That Never Ended. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group 2022.
• Ruszała, Kamil, Beata Nykiel, and Agnieszka Partridge. Sztuka w mundurze. Krakowski Oddział Grobów Wojennych 1915–1918 / Art in Uniform. The War Graves Department in Kraków 1915–1918. Kraków: ICC 2022.
• Ruszała, Kamil. Galicyjski Eksodus. Uchodźcy podczas I wojny światowej w monarchii Habsburgów (in Polish; title in English: Galician Exodus: Refugees during the First World War in the Habsburg Monarchy). Kraków: Universitas, 2020. Reprint: Kraków: Universitas, 2021 (1^st ed.), 2022 (2^nd ed).
• Ruszała, Kamil. “Conceptualizing the Post-Battle Landscape: The First World War Military Cemeteries and Monuments in Galicia.” In The Great War and the Anthropocene: Empire and Environment, Soldiers and Civilians on the Eastern Front, edited by K. S. Jobst, O. Nagornaia, and K. von Lingen. Leiden: Brill, 2024, 292–329.
• Pudłocki, Tomasz, and Kamil Ruszała, eds. Intellectuals and World War I. A Central European Perspective. Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2018.