Dr. Jan Burek is a social and cultural historian whose primary focus is on the environmental and labor history of state socialist Poland. As a SAVA Research Fellow in Environmental History (2022-25) at the UCL IAS, he studied an early 1960s international project of the Druzhba (Przyjaźń) oil pipeline from a local perspective of Płock, a town in Central Poland (where an enormous refinery and petrochemical plant was constructed as part of the Druzhba pipline network). His research focused on uncovering how the inhabitants of Płock dealt with the impact of the pipeline and the plant on the environment and their daily lives, in the context of the emerging environmental awareness.

Jan earned a doctoral degree from the European University Institute. His dissertation examined the complexities of relationships between the workers, the communist party, and the state administration and factory management in a Polish industrial town in the 1940s and 1950s. He showed how workers used the often-overlooked ideological and organizational divisions within the communist party to further their personal and group agendas. Jan also works as a Reseach and Teaching Fellow (Asystent) at the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw where he teaches courses on global and Polish post-war history.