Alumnus Member Citation
Brian Porter-Szücs grew up in the small town of Mercer, in western Pennsylvania, located about halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie. Shortly before graduating from high school, Brian’s family moved to southwestern Missouri. As a teenager, Brian played the saxophone and hoped to become a musician. Recruited by the Music Department with an offer of a full scholarship and admitted to the honors program, he came to the University of Tulsa, where he played in the marching band, the wind ensemble, and the jazz band. Recognizing that a career as a performing musician was not for him, in his sophomore year Brian defected to the History Department (his major) and the Philosophy Department (his minor). His sharp and inquisitive mind, his ability to think and write as a historian, and his maturity and confidence made Brian stand out in his classes. In 1986, he earned his B.A. degree. Later that year, he headed to the University of Warsaw to study Polish language and history on a Fulbright fellowship. Upon completion of the fellowship, Brian went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1994. Dr. Porter-Szücs is currently associate professor of history and Director of the Copernicus Endowment for Polish Studies at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1994. He and wife Ildi, of Polish and Hungarian heritage, live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Brian has three daughters—Sofia, Alexandra, and Stefania.
Brian Porter-Szücs has excelled in his professional activities. His best-known work to date is When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland, an innovative study of the ways Polish intellectuals thought about the idea of nationhood during a time when Poland was a nation without a state. By showing that nationalism did not always mean exclusion and hatred of the other, Brian speculates on a topic of great importance in Europe today—how it is possible to imagine a multicultural European nation-state. Published in 2000 by Oxford University Press, the book won awards from the Polish Institute of Arts and Science in America and from the Polish Studies Association. His second book, For God and Fatherland: Poland, Catholicism, and Modernity, is forthcoming. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern History, The American Historical Review, Slavic Review, and the Catholic Historical Review, as well as in publications in Poland. He has received fellowships from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research and from the American Council of Learned Societies. He has given talks at Columbia, Yale, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Georgetown, Stanford, Indiana University, and at the Polish Academy of Sciences. At Michigan he has found time to be on 24 Ph.D. dissertation committees and to supervise 11 senior honors theses as well as to serve on many committees in the History Department and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies.
Last year Brian Porter-Szücs received the Excellence in Education Award from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan. His initiation tonight into Phi Beta Kappa recognizes his superb teaching, scholarship, and contribution to the historical profession in America and abroad.