About
Marysia Ostafin was the Executive Director of the Copernicus Endowment and Program Manager of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (WCEE) at the University of Michigan until her retirement in 2021. A graduate of U-M, Ostafin worked at Ardis Press, publishers of Russian literature, before joining the Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies staff in 1985. As an undergraduate, she studied at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland where she developed a lasting interest in Polish language and culture. In addition, she has lived and studied in Brazil and Germany, is fluent in Polish, and speaks some Russian, Portuguese, German, and French. In 1999, Ostafin assisted in organizing the conference, “Communism’s Negotiated Collapse: The Polish Round Table, Ten Years Later,” for which she and the others received the Gold Cross of Merit from the President of Poland. She is the recipient of the 1999 Annual U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Staff Award for Excellence.
