Karolina Wigura is a historian, sociologist, and editor of Kultura Liberalna, a Polish weekly journal. She is also a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
She teaches 20th-century political philosophy, emotions in politics, sociology, and the ethics of memory (transitional justice, historical guilt, reconciliation) at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. Between 2016 and 2018, she was co-director of the Polish Programme at St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford.
Wigura has received several fellowships, including from the Zentrum Liberale Moderne, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, the German Marshall Fund, and St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford. In 2008, she was awarded the Grand Press Prize for her interview with Jürgen Habermas, “Europe in Death Paralysis.”
Author of several books, including The Guilt of Nations: Forgiveness as a Political Strategy (2011) and The Invention of Modern Heart: Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Thinking on Emotions (2019), her work has also been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Gazeta Wyborcza.