DIGITAL HUMANITIES INITIATIVE TALK SERIES

Academic Entrepreneurship: Lessons from History (Zoom)

Speaker: Dr. Michael Tworek
CEO & Co-Founder, Polis Educational Solutions
Associate, Department of History, Harvard University

16 January 2023 (Mon)
12 noon (HKT)/ 11PM (EST) 15 Jan
Online via Zoom

About the event

Most people don’t associate entrepreneurs with historians. This talk will explore how historical scholarship can be a fruitful springboard for startup ideas in tech. Using his personal example of starting two successful companies in the last five years, Dr. Tworek will discuss how his own research and teaching in the history of education and Renaissance humanism informed his journey to becoming a CEO and startup founder.

About the speaker

Dr. Michael Tworek is a research associate in the Harvard History Department, where he earned his PhD in 2014. He is an affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School. Michael’s research and teaching focus on the history of education and intellectual and cultural life of early modern Europe from transcontinental and global perspectives.

Michael’s work has been supported by Fulbright (IIE/U.S. State Department), the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Fulbright-Hays (U.S. Department of Education), Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS).

Concurrently, Michael is also the CEO and co-founder of Polis, an edtech startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that has grown out of his research and teaching and is currently part of a select alumni cohort of companies at the iLab at Harvard Business School.