The Institute of Slavic Studies (established in 1954) conducts research in linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, history, ethnology and sociology. It offers doctoral studies and is entitled to confer PhD in linguistics and cultural studies. ISS PAS is also entitled to confer postdoctoral degree (habilitation) in linguistics and cultural studies.
The Institute also includes the Zdzisław Stieber Library (holding the largest Slavic studies collection in Poland: 112,872 volumes, including 91,596 non-serial publications and 21,276 periodicals); the Slavic Academic Information Centre (Centrum Slawistycznej Informacji Naukowej); and the Slavic Publication Centre (Slawistyczny Ośrodek Wydawniczy, established in 1990), which issues eight highly ranked journals included in ERIH Plus reference index (all of them in open access), and publishes single- and multi-author monographs.
The activity and research agenda of the Institute focus on areas which are a challenge to modern humanities and which play a key role in the development of social consciousness and the preservation of material and non-material national heritage. The Polish Ministry of Education and Science has ranked the Institute as Category A+ (culture and religion studies) and Category A (linguistics) research and academic unit.
The Institute is organised into four departments (Department of Linguistics, Department of Literary and Cultural Studies, Department of History and Department of Nationality Studies) conducting research in the following areas:
- Slavic cultural heritage, diachronic studies
- national and regional identities of Slavic peoples (myths, ideas, collective memory)
- multicutlturalism, language and cultural contact, borderlands, minorities (linguistic, ethnic, religious)
- linguistic worldview
- Slavic synchronic linguistics: contrastive studies, semantics, cognitive studies, corpus linguistics
- Slavic studies around the world, resources for Slavic studies.