Michal is an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where he is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies. During 2017-2018, he carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, where he was Visiting Professsor at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, Higher School of Economics.
His work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of Eastern European communism. He is especially interested in the powerful – and subversive – impacts that communist-era built environments continue to exert on the capitalist cities of the 21st century.
He received his PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University in February 2014.