The Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology of the University of Warsaw announces changes in the management of the institute, in Warsaw and in Cairo.
Effective July 1, 2015, Dr. Zbigniew Szafrański will be succeeded by Dr. Artur Obłuski as Director of the Research Center of the PCMA UW in Cairo. Dr. Szafrański was head of the Cairo branch of PCMA UW from October 2005. He will now continue his academic career at the Polish Centre in Warsaw and will remain head of the Polish-Egyptian Archaeological and Conservation Mission of the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari.
Dr. Obłuski is a Nubian scholar, a research associate of the PCMA UW, currently directing an excavation and site presentation project at the Al-Ghazali monastery in Sudan. His current research project is a grant funded from the National Science Center of Poland, entitled “Nubian Monasticism. The role of religious institutions in the peripheries of the Byzantine world”. He is also a senior research associate of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, working on the final publication of the Qasr el-Wizz monastery in Egypt.
In Warsaw, Mrs. Iwona Zych has been nominated to the position of Deputy Director of the Polish Centre, effective July 1, 2015. She will combine her new duties with her role as Chief Editor of the PCMA’s journal Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean and the Centre’s publication department. Iwona Zych is also co-director of the Polish Centre’s joint Polish–American excavation project in Berenike, Egypt.
These two nominations complete the process of management change that was started on November 1, 2014, with the nomination of Assoc. Prof. Tomasz Waliszewski to the position of Director of the Polish Centre. He succeeded in this post Prof. Piotr Bieliński, who will now concentrate full time on his work in the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw, where he heads the Archaeology of the Near East Department.
Assoc. Prof. Waliszewski is a Classical archaeologist, lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw and currently director of the PCMA excavations in Chhîm and Jiyeh in Lebanon. He has recently published a comprehensive study summing up years of research on the subject: Elaion. Studies in Olive Oil Production in the Roman and Byzantine Levant [=PAM Monograph Series 6].