About Us

The Bauman Institute is an international centre at the University of Leeds dedicated to the promotion of teaching and research in social and critical theory.

Inspired by the legacy of Professor Zygmunt Bauman at Leeds, and the work of his life-long partner, Janina Bauman, the Institute gathers scholars based locally, nationally and internationally whose work addresses social and political transformations at a global and planetary scale in the light of classical and contemporary theory.

The Institute also maintains the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Archive, which is a major depository of their life's work. We organise regular conferences, book launches, lectures and discussion events, as well as supporting the publication of new works related to this living legacy.

About Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman (b. Poznań, 19 November 1925 – d. Leeds, 9 January 2017) is a Polish-British social and political theorist renowned for his work on modernity, postmodernity, morality, consumerism and globalization. Of Jewish heritage, he became a committed communist during the Second World War and served as an officer in the Internal Military Corps (KBW) between 1945 and 1953. He was lecturer at the University of Warsaw between 1954 and 1968, when due to the Polish political crisis, he was forced to flee to Israel. In 1971, he moved to the UK where he completed a doctorate on the British socialist movement at the London School of Economics under Robert McKenzie and later moved to Leeds, where he became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. A supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliament Assembly to ensure international political accountability, Bauman remained equally critical of Polish communism (for which during the 1968 purges, he lost his position at Warsaw) and later, of Zionism (he alleged that Israel used the Holocaust to legitimise their acts in the West Bank).

Bauman’s sociological imagination was shaped by an idiosyncratic Marxism, owing to blends of the works Antonio Gramsci, Georg Simmel, Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. Winner of the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1992), the Theodor Adorno Award of Frankfurt (1992 and the Princess of Austria Award for Communication and the Humanities (2010), he became one of the most prolific scholars in the discipline of sociology, with hundreds of published articles in academic journals and a total of 57, mostly sole-authored books. His work on modernity set a lasting paradigm in the analysis of the relationship between bureaucratic rationalisation and exclusion, especially with Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Bauman also became known for his critical thesis on consumerism and freedom and the ability of art to generate lasting values in a world characterised by endless movement. Some of the key themes and concerns in his work include an investigation of perceptions of strangerhood, the politics and poetics of utopia, as well as the cultures of fear fostered in the new inhospitable urban environments of hyperconsumption in the city.

About Janina Bauman

Janina Bauman (nee Lewison, b. Warsaw, 18 August 1926 – d. Leeds, 29 December 2009) was a Polish journalist and writer of Jewish heritage. She was the eldest of two daughters and her family lived in Warsaw. During the Second World War she was held prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto together with her mother, Alina Lewison (nee Fryszman, b.1900 - d. 1980) and only sister, Zofia (b. 1930 – d. 1971), but they managed to escape (25 January 1943). Forced to move around the country to escape imprisonment and death, after the liberation, they returned to Warsaw.

Janina studied a BA in journalism at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science after the War (1950) and an MA in Aesthetics at the University of Warsaw (1959). She met her husband, Zygmunt Bauman during her studies. The couple had three daughters: Anna Sfard, who became an eminent academic at the University Of Haifa, Lydia Bauman, who became a painter, and Irena Bauman, an architect. After the antisemitic purges in 1968, the family left Poland and moved first to Israel before settling permanently in Leeds, UK.

Janina Bauman’s professional development was affected by political turbulence and her constant move in different locations and across countries. However, while she was still in Poland, she worked in the Polish film industry as a researcher, script editor and translator. In the UK she worked as assistant librarian at a comprehensive school. After her early retirement in 1979, she wrote two books, Winter in the Morning (a biography, published by Virago, 1986) and A Dream of Belonging (a recollection of the years she spent in post war Warsaw, published by Virago, 1988). These have been translated into ten foreign languages and published in twelve countries.

Contact Us

Write to: Dr Jack Palmer  j.d.palmer@leeds.ac.uk

Write to: Professor Rodanthi Tzanelli R.Tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk