Nina Witoszek is currently research professor (forskningsleder) at the Centre for Development and the Environment at Oslo University. She is also director of the Arne Naess Programme on Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo (read more). Prior to her work at SUM, she taught comparative cultural history at the National University of Ireland in Galway (1995-1997) and the European University in Florence (1997-1999). She held fellowships at the Swedish Collegium of the Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala (1993), Robinson College, Cambridge (1995) and Mansfield College, Oxford (2001) and visiting professorship at Stanford University (2010).
Nina Witoszek is also a fiction writer (under the pen name Nina FitzPatrick). She is best known for the infamous collection of short stories, Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia (1991), which won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Award for fiction in 1991. The prize was subsequently withdrawn when she couldn’t prove her Irish ancestry. Until 2001 her fictional work – including The Loves of Faustyna (1995) and Daimons (2003), as well as several well film scripts – was written together with her late husband Pat Sheeran. She is also a script writer of a series of documentary films about iconic Norwegian heroes and thinkers, such as Fridtjof Nansen, Arne Naess, and Thor Heyerdahl.
Witoszek is the recipient of the Norwegian Freedom of Expression Foundation (Fritt Ord) Award for “bringing Eastern European perspectives to the public debate in Scandinavia.” In 2006 she was chosen by the Norwegian daily Dagbladet as “one of the 10 most important intellectuals in Norway.”
Academic Appointments and Professional affiliations (2010 – present)
- From 2019: Member of the board of Concilium Civitas: The Association of Polish Scientists Abroad.
- Member of the editorial Board of Przeglad Humanistyczny (The Humanist Review), Warszawa – since December 2016
- Member of the Board of Directors of the Evolution Institute, Florida, US – since August 2016
- Member of the Board of Directos of the International Museum of Children’s Art in Oslo – since May 2016
- Director of the Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment Oslo University