Agnieszka Aya Marczyk was the Director of the Education Program until 2021 and a 2019 Templeton-Novakovic Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

She has been a key contributor to FPRI’s Project on Democratic Transitions and its Eurasia Program for the past six years, focusing on the challenges of building and defending democracy, and on using history education as an essential means in that endeavor. She has co-edited two books on democracy and cross-cultural understanding, and published over forty translations of political and literary texts, including essays by writers like Adam Michnik, Czesław Miłosz, and Leszek Kołakowski. 

Her current research explores inquiry-based learning in high school history classrooms. She collaborates with teachers, school districts, and historians to develop and test curricular materials that invite students to engage in critical analysis of historical arguments and evidence.

Prior to joining FPRI, she taught interdisciplinary history courses at Penn, at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Jagiellonian University, and at Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Poland. She is a recipient of two student-nominated teaching awards and has collaborated with the Penn Center for Teaching and Learning to design and implement pedagogical trainings for graduate students. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, among others.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, a Master of Science in experimental cognitive psychology from Bucknell University, and a PhD in European intellectual history from the University of Pennsylvania.