Prof. Wojciech Bałus, head of the JU Department of Art Theory and Cultural Property Protection and the Centre for Stained Glass Studies, became a member of Academia Europaea. The researcher is the sixth member of the JU academic community to join this prestigious organisation, which brings together over 5,5 thousand scholars from all over the world.
Academia Europaea was established in 1988 and is the Pan-European Academy of Sciences Humanities and Letters. Its objective is the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages in the aforesaid subjects in Europe. Academia Europaea is a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy. Its members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research. It brings together more than 5,500 members which includes leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and the law.
More than one hundred Poles can be counted amongst the members of Academia Europaea, including several from the Jagiellonian University: Prof. Stanisław Biernat (Faculty of Law and Administration), Prof. Józef Dulak (Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology, Prof. Wojciech Czakon (Faculty of Management and Social Communication) as well as Prof. Marek Sanak and Prof. Anetta Undas. (Faculty of Medicine).
Prof. Wojciech Bałus graduated in art history from the Jagiellonian University (1985). He also studied philosophy at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków. In 1990, he successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Theory of Art by Jan Sas Zubrzycki. A study from the borderline of the history of art and the history of ideas, written under the supervision of Prof. Piotr Krakowski. He obtained his habilitation in 1997 for his dissertation Mundus melancholicus. The melancholic world in the mirror of art. In 2005, he became a professor of the humanities. His interests include the theory and history of art of the 19th and 21st centuries, as well as the relationship between art and philosophy, cultural anthropology and literary studies.
In the years 1999–2002, he was the deputy director – and in 2002–2008, the director – of the JU Institute of Art History. He is the founder and first editor-in-chief of the journal Modus. Works from the history of art and the publishing series Ars Vetus et Nova. Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of the annual publication Folia Historiae Artium, published by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the chairman of the Polish National Committee Corpus Vitrearum, ordinary member of the Hessische Akademie der Forschung und Plannung im Landlichen Raum, active member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, member of the Academia Europaea, AICA, the Art History Commission of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Council of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and the Senate of the Jagiellonian University. In the years 2012–2015, chairman of the Humanities and Theological Sciences Team of the Polish Accreditation Committee. Vice-chairman of the Art Sciences Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the winner of the MASTER programme of the Foundation for Polish Science (2015). He is a visiting professor at the universities of Kiel (1997) and Mainz (2006).
