Magdalena Gawin is a historian and long-time employee of IH PAN. From 2015-2021 she was the Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as well as the General Conserver of Monuments. Currently she hold the position of director at the Pilecki Institute. She completed her degree in History at the University of Warsaw, as well as a PhD in history, and in 2016 she recieved her degree, Habilitated Doctor on the basis of her scientific achievements and her monograph “Dispute for women’s equality (1864–1919)”. As Deputy Minister of Culture and General Conservator of Monuments, she contributed to the document “the Warsaw Recommendation on the reconstruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage”. Her idea was used in 2016 to create the Witold Pilecki Centre for Totalitarian Studies, which in 2018 was turned into the Pilecki Institute. The Pilecki Institute is continuously growing (it has branches in Augustów and Berlin, and will soon open a branch in the USA). Thanks to her efforts, the Institute signed various agreements with foreign archives to digitize materials concerning Polish matters and Poles in the twentieth century. This will be the largest archive of source materials that a Polish Institute has created.
