Justyna Olko

Justyna Olko is a professor at the University of Warsaw's Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, director of its Center for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity, and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Her experience encompasses a number of multidisciplinary team projects as well as outreach-oriented enterprises in close collaboration with research institutions from Europe, the Americas and Africa. Her main areas of research include Indigenous history and sociolinguistics, multilingualism, linguistic and cultural diversity, language revitalization and decolonial research practices. Justyna is not only a recipient of both the ERC Starting and Consolidator Grants, but is also the first researcher in Poland to have obtained an ERC grant in the humanities, and the first woman and representative of the humanities and social sciences to be awarded the grant twice. She also coordinated the project "Engaged Humanities in Europe" (Twinning Program, Horizon 2020), officially recognized as "a success story" of the European Commission, and beginning this year, she will coordinate the consortium project "Fostering Linguistic Capital: A Roadmap for Reversing the Diversity Crisis and Activating Societal Benefits in Europe"(HORIZON-CL2-2024-HERITAGE-01). In 2020 she became a winner of the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year in social sciences and humanities for “Breaking the walls between Academy and local communities in favor of linguistic diversity”. Justyna consciously combines academic research with socially engaged work dealing with marginalized and minoritized communities, acting as a self-reflective ally of Indigenous and ethnic minority groups. Over the last fifteen years, together with her team members she has been able to foster broad relationships and innovative networks between academic, NGOs and community partners in Europe and beyond.