Dr. Aleksander Musial

Project description
Olek Musiał's research project, entitled ‘Serfdom and Slavery: Eastern European Emancipatory Architecture in the Age of Revolutions,’ explores designs engaged in debates on the emancipation of serf population in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. By analysing surviving structures, works on paper, and archival sources, the project argues that radical social movements in Eastern Europe leading to one of the continent’s largest modern emancipation transformations consciously blurred the distinction between serfdom and slavery through the active use of imagery integrating Greek, Roman, and Slav antiquities in challenging legal justifications for labour exploitation of enserfed workers. Works of art and architecture will be explored through the lens of interconnected protagonists based in Warsaw (Poland), Korsun (Ukraine), Rome (Italy), and Saint Petersburg (Russian Empire). By combining evidence from architectural studies, print culture, and histories of science, especially contemporaneous discourses on physiocracy and race, this approach interrogates the changing notions of individual and collective power structures that sought to revolutionise the living conditions of the vast majority of rural populations by turning them into autonomous subjects. The debate regarding the emancipation of serfs would activate images and architectural visions of new liberated settlements as sites for a radical rethinking of class relationships addressing and resisting contemporary power structures through active engagement with the discourse on transatlantic abolitionism.

Bio
Aleksander (Olek) Musiał specialises in early modern art and architecture, with a particular focus on intersections between the emergence of modern archaeology and radical social reforms in 18th-century Eastern Europe. A graduate of Warsaw, Cambridge, and Princeton, he pursued research thanks to fellowships and visiting positions at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, the Bibliotheca Hertziana Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. Olek’s articles have appeared in the Princeton University Art Museum Record, and the Oxford Art Journal, for which he was awarded with the Emerging Scholars Publication Prize by the College Art Association-affiliated Society of Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.