Aleksandra Pomiecko is a Lecturer in Modern Russian History. She has previously taught at the University of St Andrews, the University of Manitoba, and at the University of Toronto. Aleksandra also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and she continues to contribute to their Encyclopedia Project. Prior to this, she received her PhD from the University of Toronto and her MA at Uniwersytet Jagielloński. 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• War and violence in twentieth century Eastern Europe
• Paramilitary, partisan, and bandit activity
• Local and lived experiences of conflict

Aleksandra's research centres on histories of war and conflict in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space, primarily in the twentieth century. Her current research explores banditry and insurgency in the so-called Eastern European borderland regions, after the First World War. Her earlier research focused on transnational Belarusian networks and actors in the twentieth century.

Selected publications

“Belarusian Nationalists and Nation-Building Efforts in the Twilight of the Second World War,” in Reshaping the Nation: Collective Identities and Post-War Violence in Europe 1944-1948, ed. Ota Konrád, Boris Barth, Jaromir Mrňka (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022): 65 – 90.

“Slutsk in 1920: Entangled Fighters, Locals, and Conflicts,” Slavic Review 80, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 749 – 768; “The Black Sheep of the Land: Bandits in the Polish Borderlands, 1918 – 1925,” Journal of Historical Sociology 34, no. 3 (September 2021): 439 – 451.

“‘It’s never too late to fight for one’s family and nation’: Attempts at ‘Belarusifying’ Soldiers in German-sponsored Armed Formations 1941-1944,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 33, no. 2 (2020): 259-276.

“Villains, Profiteers, and ‘Robin Hoods’: Banditry in the Northeastern regions of the Second Polish Republic in the 1920s,” Journal of Belarusian Studies 8, no. 1 (2016): 5-31.