Anna Dobrowolska is a historian of sexuality, visual culture, and gender under state socialism. In 2021, she defended her DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford. Between 2021 and 2023 Anna was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and an EUI-IHEID Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Between 2023 and 2024 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. In 2024, Anna received the Polish Science Foundation's START Fellowship for young researchers and was awarded the Barbara Skarga Scholarship in recognition of the interdisciplinary character of her research.

Anna joined the University of Basel in February 2025 as a PostDoc Assistant (Bereichsassistentin) for East European and Modern History. In Basel, Anna is teaching classes in the history of gender, sexuality, and the body, and developing a new research project on the history of menstrual experience in the second half of the twentieth century.

Anna has published extensively in both Polish and English, and her articles have appeared in academic journals such as the Journal of Women’s History, Aspasia, Rethinking History, Przegląd Historyczny, and Kultura i Społeczeństwo. Her English-language monograph, Polish Sexual Revolutions. Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. She also published two monographs in Polish: Zawodowe dziewczyny. Prostytucja i praca seksualna w PRL [Professional girls. Prostitution and sex work in state-socialist Poland] (2020) and Nie tylko Chałupy. Naturyzm w PRL [Not only Chałupy. Naturism in state-socialist Poland] (2024). 

Anna shares the results of her research on a dedicated Instagram page: @historieintymne.