Padraic Kenney
Padraic Jeremiah Kenney is a professor of history and International Studies at Indiana University. Previously, he was Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
He is the author of several books on East European history and politics; his area of specialization is social change and political change in the contemporary world, in particular civil resistance to authoritarian regimes and democratic revolutions. His most recent book, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World, examines political prisoners and imprisoning regimes from the mid-19th century, in particular in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, and South Africa, as well as the men detained at Guantanamo Bay. His 2002 work, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989, has been translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Czech. A history of post-communism, Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe Since 1989, was translated into Croatian and Italian.
In 2016, he was president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
He is a frequent contributor to the Polish online weekly Kultura liberalna. Other essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Denver Post.
He was awarded a grant under the Fulbright Program in 2005.Selected publications
- Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2017,
- The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe Since 1989, Zed Books, 2006,
- Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005,
- A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, Princeton University Press, 2002,
- Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950, Cornell University Press, 1996,
