Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski

Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski is Professor of Polish-Lithuanian History at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES).

Biography He studied history at the University of Cambridge, graduating with first class honours in 1989. He gained his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1994. He taught at the University of Łódź in 1993–94, then held a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford. He became a lecturer in Modern European History at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1997. He joined SSEES in 2005, becoming a professor in 2013.

His book The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1733-1795: Light and Flame won the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America's Oskar Halecki Award in 2021 and the Polish Historical Society's Pro Historia Polonorum prize in 2022. The Polish edition is longer.

Butterwick was awarded the bronze medal Gloria Artis for his services to Polish culture in 2016. In March 2022, he became principal historian of the Polish History Museum in Warsaw. In 2024 he was created professor of the humanities by the president of the Republic of Poland.

Personal life He married Wioletta Pawlikowska in Poland in 2012.

Books Poland's Last King and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski, 1732-1798 (Oxford: OUP, 1998, ) The Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1788-1792: A Political History (Oxford: OUP, 2012, ; longer Polish edition) The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1733–1795 (Yale University Press, 2020, ) The Constitution of 3 May 1791: Testament of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Warsaw: Polish History Museum, 2021, Link) Lithuania: A Short History (Hurst Publishers, 2025, )