Born in Milwaukee, WI, John J. Kulczycki attended St. Josephat's parochial school and Marquette University High School. He received his B.S. in history from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, having spent his junior year in a study abroad program at the University of Vienna, Austria. Following graduation he was a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in Ethiopia as a teacher. He received his graduate education at Columbia University in New York City, where he was awarded a Ph.D. "with distinction" for a dissertation based on research in Poland. There he met his future wife Regina Bowgierd, who died in 2019. He taught Polish and East European history and the history of nationalism at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is Professor Emeritus. His publications include his most recent book Belonging to the Nation: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1939-1951 (Harvard University Press, 2016), for which he was awarded "Honorable Mention" by the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for the best book in Polish Studies published in 2016.