Katarzyna Szczepańska is assistant professor (adjunct) at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Poland, Faculty of Law and Administration at the Chair of Civil, Commercial, Company and Insurance Law specialising in European private law, company law and comparative legal studies. She holds an LL.M. from Christian-Albrechts-Universität (Kiel) and was also lecturer at the Europa-Universitat-Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder) for Polish-German Legal studies. Szczepańska was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg and at the European University Institute (Florence) and has also participated in executive training at the College of Europe and ERA Academy of European Law (Trier). She is alumna of the European Commission Blue Book Programme in the Legal Service and member of professional and academic communities i.e.: Poznań Bar Association, ELI, EAPIL, Verein der „Freunde des Hamburger Max-Planck-Instituts für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht e.V., DAAD Alumni Fachnetzwerk Rechtswissenschaften, Polish Association of European Law. She cooperates with the European Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Corporate Law Studies.
During her Fellowship under the supervision of Walter Doralt in June she is pursuing the subject of private enforcement of the EU anti-cartel rules in the groups of companies in the light of the newest case law of the CJEU. She is particularly interested in the crosscut, piercing into or maybe even a diffusion of the EU law concepts (competition law) and the field of private law and the tangent points of them. At the beginning of her stay on 3 June 2026 she held a kick-off presentation at the Privatissimum workshop on the topic of “Rethinking the concept of single economic unit doctrine - from Sumal (C-882/19) to the Government of Bahrain (C-672/23 and C-673/23)” asking further questions on the possibility or a need of conceptualising a notion of the groups of companies on the European level which gave her further discussion points. Her aim for the fellowship in Graz is to develop a conception and stress-test the previous idea for a monograph publication aiming at habilitation preceedings. She is very grateful for the invitation to cooperate with Walter Doralt and colleagues at the Department of Civil Law, Foreign Private Law and Private International Law and to be in the welcoming academic city of Graz and is looking forward to the further exchanges and to the possibility of getting to know Austrian academia a little bit better.