The winner of the first Leszek Kołakowski Honorary Fellowship, awarded by the Foundation for Polish Science, is Dr Dmitri Levitin from the University of Oxford, a researcher in the fields of intellectual history and the history of philosophy.
Dr Dmitri Levitin is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where he earned an MPhil and, in 2011, a PhD in history with a dissertation on the history of philosophy in England in 1650–1700. In 2010–2015 he worked at Cambridge. He has received numerous prizes and distinctions, including the Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2013–2014). He was a visiting fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington (2013). Since 2015 he has worked as a research fellow at Oxford’s prestigious All Souls College.
He is the author of many publications on the history of modern European thought, including the history of philosophy, science, medicine, and church-state relations. He is currently working on two monographs, one concerning intellectual and religious transformations in England in 1580–1750 and the other on metaphysics in European philosophical literature of the 16th and 17th century, where Levitin compares the historical and philosophical works of Isaac Newton and Pierre Bayle.
The purpose of the Leszek Kołakowski Honorary Fellowship is to recognize scholars with distinguished research achievements in the history of ideas and medieval and modern philosophy to 1939. The one-year fellowship may be awarded to researchers from Poland or abroad. The competition is conducted through a nomination system, with candidates proposed by scholars from all over the world personally invited to submit nominations.
The selection of the winner was made by an award committee made up of philosophers and intellectual historians of international renown: Prof. Rémi Brague from the University of Munich and the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, Prof. Wolf Lepenies from the Free University of Berlin, Prof. Mark Lilla from Columbia University in New York, Sir Noel Malcolm from All Souls College, Oxford, Prof. Steven Nadler from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, Prof. Bogdan Szlachta from Jagiellonian University, and Prof. Karol Tarnowski from Jagiellonian University and the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków.
The amount of the fellowship in the first competition is PLN 90,000. The fellowship is financed half from the Prof. Leszek Kołakowski Fund established for this purpose and half by the Foundation for Polish Science out of its own funds.
The competition for the Leszek Kołakowski Fellowship is held every two years.
*Pictured: Dr Dmitri Levitin (photo by Elena Kviatkovskaia)