ASC Anniversary Symposium
“American Studies: Pasts, Presents, Futures”
11–13 May 2026
In 2026, the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw celebrates its 50th anniversary. To mark this milestone, we are delighted to invite you to the Anniversary Symposium “American Studies: Past, Presents, Futures” to reflect on the current state of American Studies from a European perspective. With our honored guests, we aim to discuss the unique insights European scholarship brings to the analysis of the multiple changes the U.S. faces, as well as the future of teaching and researching the field in Europe.
Schedule
Monday, May 11
Dobra 55, room 1.110
13:00–13:15 Conference opening
Panel 1
13:15–14:45 American Studies in/as Area Studies
moderator: Alicja Fijałkowska-Myszyńska, University of Warsaw, ASC
José Antonio Gurpegui, University of Alcala
Emma Long, University of East Anglia
Radosław Rybkowski, Jagiellonian University
Bohdan Szklarski, University of Warsaw, ASC
14:45–15:15 coffee break
Panel 2
15:15–16:45 Positionality and Europeanness
moderator: Jan Smoleński, University of Warsaw, ASC
Tomasz Basiuk, University of Warsaw, ASC
Michał Choiński, Jagiellonian University
Dominika Ferens, University of Wrocław
Agnieszka Graff, University of Warsaw, ASC
Benita Heiskanen, University of Turku
17:00–17:45 ASC@50 Anniversary Session
Małgorzata Durska, University of Warsaw, ASC
Zbigniew Kwiecień, University of Warsaw, ASC
Anna Sosnowska, University of Warsaw, ASC
Conference dinner
Tuesday, 12 May
Dobra 55, room 1.120
Panel 3
9:30–11:00 New Disciplines and Critical Theory in American Studies
moderator: Agnieszka Kotwasińska, University of Warsaw
Kacper Bartczak, University of Łódź
Paweł Frelik, University of Warsaw, ASC
Ingrid Gessner, Vorarlberg University of Education, EAAS President
Karolina Krasuska, University of Warsaw, ASC
Justyna Włodarczyk, University of Warsaw, Institute of English Studies
11:00–11:30 coffee break
Panel 4
11:30–13:00 Polish Trajectories of American Studies
moderator: Jędrzej Burszta, University of Warsaw, ASC
Paulina Ambroży, Adam Mickiewicz University
Marek Paryż, University of Warsaw, Institute of English Studies, PAAS President
Marek Wilczyński, University of Warsaw, ASC
Beata Zawadka, University of Szczecin
13:00–14:15 lunch
Panel 5
14:15–15:45 Teaching American Studies in Europe
moderator: Ludmiła Janion, University of Warsaw, ASC
Kornelia Boczkowska, Adam Mickiewicz University
William Glass, University of Warsaw, ASC
Benita Heiskanen, University of Turku
Martin Lüthe, Free University of Berlin, American Studies Network President
Welf Werner, Heidelberg University
15:45–16:15 coffee break
Panel 6
16:15–17:45 Doing American Studies from/in Europe
moderator: Anna Kurowicka, University of Warsaw, ASC
Paulina Ambroży, Adam Mickiewicz University
Martin Klepper, Humboldt University of Berlin
Sylwia Kuźma, University of Warsaw, ASC
Emma Long, University of East Anglia
Welf Werner, Heidelberg University
17:45–18:00 Closing remarks
Young Americanists’ Day
Wednesday, May 13
Dobra 55, room 1.120
9:45–10:00 Welcome
Panel 1
10:00–11:30 Disjuncture, Disruption, Development: Doctoral Students at the ASC (Roundtable)
moderator: Karolina Krasuska, University of Warsaw, ASC
Michał Doroszenko, University of Warsaw, Doctoral School of Humanities
Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, University of Warsaw, DSOH
Zuzanna Mazzoll, University of Warsaw, Interdisciplinary Doctoral School
Joanna Szymaniak, University of Warsaw, DSOH
11:30-11:45 coffee break
Panel 2
11:45–13:15 Cripping American Studies: Cultural Representations of Disabilities
moderator: Krystyna Mazur, University of Warsaw, ASC
Emilia Głębocka, University of Warsaw, ASC
Marcus Ángel Ochla, University of Warsaw, ASC
Hanna Bączkowska, University of Warsaw, ASC
Mikołaj Tkaczyk, University of Warsaw, ASC
13:15–14:15 lunch break
Panel 3
14:15–15:45 Are we Americanists? Crossing Disciplines with New Key Terms in American Studies
moderator: Agnieszka Graff, University of Warsaw, ASC
Aleksandra Zuzanna Leniarska, University of Warsaw, DSOH
Matin Nikookar Ardestani, University of Warsaw, DSOH
Magdalena Gabrysiak, University of Warsaw, DSOH
Sebastian Smoliński, University of Warsaw, DSOH
15:45–16:00 Closing remarks
Symposium Panelists
Paulina Ambroży is Associate Professor and Head of The Department of American Studies: Literature and Media at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research centers on American (more recently also Canadian and Polish) avantgarde and experimental poetry. She is interested in intersections between poetry, literary philosophy, science and the visual arts. She is the author of (Un)concealing the Hedgehog: Modernist American Poets and Contemporary Critical Theories (Poznań, 2012), which received the 2014 American Studies Network Book Prize for remarkable research in American studies. With Liliana Sikorska, Joanna Jarząb-Napierała and Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska she has authored Between the Self and the Other: Essays on the Poetry of Paul Muldoon (2018), a study which fuses four perspectives: autobiographical, geopoetic, postcolonial, and intertextual. She is a recipient of two research grants from the Polish-American Fulbright Foundation: a Junior Fulbright Research Grant (Stanford University, 2002-2003), a Senior Fulbright Advanced Research Grant (The University of Chicago, 2014). Currently, she is working on a comparative project involving posthumanist, ecocritical, and new materialist approaches to the North American and Polish lyric.
Kacper Bartczak is a Polish poet, literary scholar, translator, and professor of American literature at the University of Łódź, where he heads the Department of North American Literature and Culture. He has published numerous scholarly books and articles on figures such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, and Peter Gizzi. He is the author of In Search of Communication and Community: The Poetry of John Ashbery (Peter Lang, 2006) and a collection of essays in Polish, Świat nie scalony (The Unintegrated World), for which he received the annual award of the magazine Literatura na Świecie. His latest collection of literary essays is called Materia i autokreacja (2019). As a poet, he is the author of several collections, two of which have been finalists in major Polish literary awards. As a poetry translator, he translated volumes of selected poems by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein and Peter Gizzi. In 2025 he received the Silesius literary award for lifetime achievement. He lives and works in Lodz, Poland.
Kornelia Boczkowska is Associate Professor at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University. Her research focuses on the history, theory and practice of American experimental film in addition to independent and documentary film, ecocinema, women’s film and new media. She is the recipient of several research grants and author of two books and circa. fifty articles, chapters and book reviews. Her recent papers have appeared in Adaptation, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Mobilities, New Review of Film and Television Studies and other peer-reviewed journals. She teaches courses on film history, film studies and theory, experimental film and video, American and world cinema, independent film and British and American studies.
Jędrzej Burszta is a cultural studies scholar, ethnographer, Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. In 2019 he received his doctoral degree in cultural studies from the SWPS University in Warsaw for a dissertation examining the queer history of American science fiction literature. His research interests include American popular and alternative culture, speculative fiction, retrofuturism, queer studies, ethnography of memory. Between 2017 and 2019, he conducted ethnographic research as part of the international project “CRUSEV: Cruising the Seventies”. Recently, he co-edited with Tomasz Basiuk and Agnieszka Kościańska the volume Odmieńczość: obywatelstwo seksualne i archiwum (WUW 2024). He is currently PI in the research project “Psychedelic Culture in Poland: Practices and Discourses” (2024–2026).
Małgorzata Durska is a sociologist and economist. The recipient of numerous scholarship programs, e.g. Fulbright (Indiana University and New York University), Erasmus Sigma and U.S. Department of State. Academic researcher and lecturer at Executive MBA programs, consultant in business communication and business culture with a 3-year experience in an international advertising company at the position of a Creative Director. For many years served as a Deputy Director of the Institute of the Americas and Europe, a coordinator of academic mobility, and a coordinator of the Polish-American Entrepreneurship Program. Co-founder and the first director of Polish Professional Women Network Translator of business culture books. Currently serves as a General Director of the Polish Business Roundtable (PRB) and a President of The PRB Foundation.
Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Co-Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include cultures of speculation, science fiction, video games, and fantastic audiovisualities. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the boards of Science Fiction Studies (USA), Extrapolation (UK/USA), Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (UK), and GeoHumanities (USA), and is the co-editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. In 2017, he was the first non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service presented for outstanding service to the field of science fiction studies. In 2023, he was the recipient of SFRA’s Innovative Research Award.
José Antonio Gurpegui is Full Professor of American Studies at the Modern Philology Department of the Universidad de Alcalá, Director of Instituto Franklin-UAH.
Ingrid Gessner is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University College of Education Vorarlberg, Austria, and serves as President of the European Association for American Studies (2024–2028). Her interdisciplinary scholarship sits at the intersections of Medical, Environmental, and Digital Humanities, examining how culture and media frame collective memory and biological crisis. She is the author of Yellow Fever Years: An Epidemiology of Nineteenth-Century Literature (2016), and the award-winning From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences (2007). Her recent research also focuses on pandemic fictions, and on how augmented reality (AR) and digital media shape contemporary environmental justice activism. She serves on the editorial boards of Amerikastudien / American Studies and the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies and is the Director of the European Journal for American Studies.
William Glass earned degrees in history from Centre College (BA) and Emory University (MA, PhD) and studied church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He teaches courses on American history, religion, race, and cinema. His research interests center on American Protestantism, the American South, and the use of films as cultural documents. His research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has been a Fulbright Fellow in Poland. He has published essays in The Journal of Church and State, Film & History, Jewish Social Studies, and contributed entries for American National Biography and the Encyclopedia of Southern Religion.
Benita Heiskanen is Professor of North American Studies and Director of the John Morton Center at the University of Turku. Heiskanen received her Ph.D. in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and has since then worked in American Studies in Ireland, Denmark, and Finland. Within the past decade, Heiskanen has led three major research projects, funded by the Research Council of Finland and the Kone Foundation, combining team fieldwork, visual-spatial contestation, and cultural analysis. Theoretically, she is interested in the politics of visual culture, practices of looking, and research ethics. Methodologically, she specializes in transdisciplinary research practices, multi-sited fieldwork, and visual methods. She recently completed a monograph entitled “US-Cuba Visual Politics: Envisioning Havana, Miami, and ‘Accidental Fieldwork’ Sites,” forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. She is a past-president of the American Studies Network (2021–2023) and sits on the advisory board of the European Journal of American Studies. Heiskanen is an award-winning media commentator on U.S. politics, elections, and current events in Finland.
Ludmiła Janion works at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, where she teaches gender studies and methodologies of cultural studies. Her research focuses on transformations in gender and sexuality during late state socialism in Poland and in the decade following the 1989 socioeconomic transition. Currently, she is a PI of the project titled “Transformations of heteromasculine intimacies in Poland in the transition era (1987–1999)” and a member of the “Queer Theory in Transit” research team, led by Prof. Tomasz Basiuk and Prof. Eveline Kilian. She has published her research in Sexualities, Journal of Homosexuality, Feminist Media Studies, and other journals.
Martin Klepper is professor for American literature and culture at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. After his doctoral work at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien at the Free University of Berlin (Ph.D. 1994 for the book Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo – Die amerikanische Postmoderne zwischen Spiel und Rekonstruktion. Frankfurt: Campus, 1996) he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Hamburg (1997-2004, second book: The Discovery of Point of View: Observation and Narration in the American Novel 1790-1910. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011), as a lecturer at the University of Landau (2004-2005), and as a professor for American Studies at the University of Kiel (2005-07). His areas of research and publication are narrative identities; visuality and perspective in the 19th century; the American postmodern and utopian novel; the history of American cinema. He is currently working on a project involving Self-Help and Mass Culture from the Progressive Era to today. His last publications are: Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013 (with Claudia Holler), Approaches to American Cultural Studies Milton Park: Routledge, 2017 (with Antje Dallmann and Eva Boesenberg), two special editions on Self-Help (2022, 2023) and one on Dark Academia (2024).
Agnieszka Kotwasińska is an assistant professor of American literature and culture at the American Studies Center, the University of Warsaw. She specializes in gothic and horror studies, science fiction studies, gender studies and queer theory, and feminist new materialism(s). Her research interests centre on embodiment in the so-called low genres, death, illness and old age in genre cinema and television. She has published articles in Somatechnics, Polish Journal of American Studies and Humanities, among others, and chapters in Monsters: A Companion (Peter Lang, 2019), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Diffractive Reading New Materialism, Theory, Critique (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) and Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (Routledge, 2022). Her first monograph, House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction, was published in 2023 by University of Wales Press. She is currently working on a book about death and dying in contemporary horror cinema.
Karolina Krasuska is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, the founding director of the research group Gender/Sexuality at the ASC, and the convenor of the Gender and Sexuality MA program at the University of Warsaw. She is a co-investigator within the NCN/DFG grant “QueerIt: Queer Theory in Transit” and the PI in the NCN grant “Affective Poetics: Manifestos and Women’s Rhetorical Strategies, 1970-2020.” She is the author of a 2012 Polish-language monograph examining modernist texts from a transnational, gender-oriented perspective and a co-editor of Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (2015). Her two recent books Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction (2024) and Poradzieckie (2021) expand her transnational literature interests into the twenty-first century. Karolina Krasuska also translates gender/queer theory into Polish, including Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (2008).
Anna Kurowicka is an Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center. Her 2015 research stay at Emory University was funded by the Kościuszko Foundation, and in 2024 she received a scholarship funded by the National Agency for Academic Exchange to spend a semester at Humboldt University in Berlin. As part of an international research team led by Prof. Tomasz Basiuk and Prof. Eveline Kilian (Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts; 2023-2026, National Science Center), she investigates the reception of queer theory in Polish English and American Studies. She has published on asexuality, science fiction, and fantasy in Sexualities, Teksty Drugie, Feminist Formations, and Science Fiction Film and Television. Her book, Queer Asexual Figures in Popular Fiction and Television, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press in 2027.
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska is a historian and Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She specializes in twentieth century social and cultural history of the United States and Poland and transnational history. Her areas of research include: women’s and gender history, transnational history of reproduction and public health, history of social movements, and history of immigration. She has been a recipient of several research grants and stipends (Fulbright Senior Award, Kosciuszko Foundation fellowship, National Science Center OPUS grant, National Program for the Development of Humanities grant). Currently Professor Kuźma is pursuing research on the transnational history of the Polish anti-abortion movement (1970s-1990s).
Zbigniew Kwiecień received an MA from the Department of History at the University of Warsaw in Far Eastern Modern Diplomatic History and Ph.D. in American Far Eastern Policy in late 1930’s. Ten years of teaching of Modern and Contemporary History of International Relations in the Institute of History, University of Warsaw as an Assistant Professor and Senior Assistant Professor. Since 1984 in the American Studies Center teaching courses in various aspects of the United States’ history – mostly diplomatic and military. Teaches also Modern and Contemporary World History at the Alexander Gieysztor Academy of Humanities in Pułtusk.
Emma Long is Director of the Arthur Miller Institute for American Studies at the University of East Anglia and an Associate Professor of American History and Politics. She is a scholar of the US Supreme Court and has an additional interest (and forthcoming book) looking at American evangelicalism in the middle of the 20th Century.
Martin Lüthe is currently an associate professor/lecturer at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Lüthe published the monographs “We Missed a Lot of Church, So the Music Is Our Confessional”: Rap and Religion (Lit Verlag, 2008) and Color-Line and Crossing-Over: Motown and Performances of Blackness in 1960s American Culture (WVT, 2011). Lüthe finished his second dissertation, the German Habilitation, with a manuscript on Wire Writing: Media Change in the Culture of the Progressive Era in February 2025. Lüthe is a member of the editorial board of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture and is working on a book manuscript entitled The Beautiful Digital Game: A Cultural History of Soccer Video Games.
Marek Paryż is Associate Professor of American literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. He serves as President of the Polish Association for American Studies. He is the chief editor of The Polish Journal for American Studies and the senior editor of the European Journal of American Studies. His current research focuses on the Western across narrative arts. He has co-edited The Western in the Global Literary Imagination (Brill, 2022) and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Transnational Western.
Radosław Rybkowski is Professor at the Jagiellonian University and Director of the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora.
Anna Sosnowska is an associate professor of sociology at the American Studies Center. Her research focuses on historical sociology of migrations from Eastern Europe to major American cities of New York City and Chicago in industrial and postindustrial era, and methodology and history of the historical sociological research. She is an author of Polski Greenpoint a Nowy Jork. Gentryfikacja, stosunki etniczne i imigrancki rynek pracy na przełomie XX i XXI wieku, and Explaining Economic Backwardness. Post-war Polish Historians on Eastern Europe, Central European University Press and co-editor of Stan Rzeczy 2021 issue on historical sociology. She was awarded a Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship for 2023. She teaches classes on the US immigration and cities.
Bohdan Szklarski is Associate Professor of Political Science, Graduate of the English Institute, Warsaw University and the Department of Political Science, Northeastern University, Boston. In his over 30 years of teaching, he has taught at numerous American and Polish Universities. He served as a director of the American Studies Center, Warsaw University in years 2012–2016. Now he is the Head of the Leadership Studies at ASC. He also lectures at Collegium Civitas, a non-public college of social sciences. He guest lectured at many universities in the USA, China, Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Czech Republic, Georgia, Vietnam. Prof. Szklarski’s research interests include political leadership, political communication, American political culture and institutions, comparative politics and political anthropology. The author of over 60 academic publications, he frequently appears as a commentator on American and Polish political events in the media.
Welf Werner is the Director of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) in Germany. He was trained in economics, finance, management, and economic history at Freie Universität Berlin and Indiana University in Bloomington. Before joining the faculty of International University Bremen in 2004 as Professor of International Economics, he taught U.S. economic policy and history as a lecturer and assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. Welf Werner received his Ph.D. and Habilitation (venia legendi) from the Economics Department of Freie Universität Berlin. He was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies and a research fellow at both Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and George Washington University. In 2018, he was appointed Professor of American Studies at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Heidelberg University and Director of the university’s HCA. His research and teaching focus on U.S. domestic and foreign economic policies, with particular attention to their interconnections with history and political science.
Marek Wilczyński -full professor of humanities, is interested in the history of American culture and literature of the years 1776-1865, in particular in the region of New England between 1776-1939. He also reads widely on the history of American painting (19th-20th century), literary and cultural theory, postmodern American fiction, and comparative literature (Polish and American). He is an author of The Phantom and the Abyss. Gothic Fiction in America and Aesthetics of the Sublime (1798-1856), over eighty articles, most recently in Beyond Philology, Schulz/Forum, and Kultura Popularna. He’s also edited or coedited four collections of essays.
Beata Zawadka is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Literature and New Media at the University of Szczecin, Poland. Trained originally as a literary scholar, she currently works across media studies, with a particular emphasis on film and game studies. Her research focuses on contemporary audiovisual culture understood as a dynamic, relational, and affective environment shaped by digital technologies. Her postdoctoral monograph, Dis/Reputed Region: Transcoding the U.S. South, was published in 2019. She is currently working on three book projects: a co-edited volume on time and space in digital culture; a co-authored study of Daphne du Maurier as a cultural morph; and a monograph entitled After Representation: A Proprioceptive Theory of Digital Culture, proposing a new theoretical paradigm for the study of contemporary digital audiovisual culture.
Young Americanists’ Day Participants:
Matin Nikookar Ardestani is a PhD Student in Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw’s Doctoral School of Humanities. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, and a Master’s degree with Distinction from the same university’s American Studies Center.
Hanna Bączkowska is an MA student in American Studies and a BA graduate from the same faculty. Her interdisciplinary research spans literature, film, and drama, with her BA thesis focused on interrogating identity politics in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. During her first MA year, she participated in an ASC-led panel on Hollywood’s pioneering director Dorothy Arzner. Her current academic interests include U.S. and Latin American cinema, postcolonial and transnational gender politics, and, eternally, James Baldwin.
Michał Doroszenko is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw. They hold an MA from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw and a BA in Multimedia from the Academy of Arts in Szczecin. Their interests lie in gender and queer studies, 20th-century philosophy, contemporary art, and philosophy of science. Their doctoral research explores the evolution of gender in the 19th and 20th centuries through the lens of the “hermaphrodite” category.
Magdalena Gabrysiak is pursuing her PhD in Culture and Religion Studies at the University of Warsaw. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Literature at the University of Cambridge. She went on to obtain a Master’s in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford.
Emilia Głębocka is a 1st year MA student at the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. Her previous research centered around gender and sexuality in Victorian times. She is currently focused on theater performance, an interest she also pursues practically outside of academia.
Aleksandra Zuzanna Leniarska is a Ph.D researcher at the University of Warsaw in the discipline of literature. She received the Fulbright Junior Research Award and did her research in computational literary studies at Stanford University (2021-22). She is associated with the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw. Her academic interests include literary realism, contemporary fiction and sociology of literature.
Aleksandra Julia Malinowska is a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw. Her project “Affective Poetics: Manifestos and Women’s Rhetorical Strategies, 1970-2020” is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland. She is an affiliate member of the Gender/Sexualities Research Group, as well as affiliate faculty at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. In the past, she has worked on the Polish German research project “Queer Theory in Transit” funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (2023). Most recently, she has spent a semester conducting her doctoral project research at Arizona State University, funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (2025). Her work has been published in Women’s History Review (2026), Feminist Review (2025) and The New Americanist (2023).
Zuzanna Mazzoll is a gender and sexuality studies scholar and a 1st year PhD student at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral School at the University of Warsaw. Her scientific interests include corporeal and material feminism, critical race theory, embodiment, and body politics. Currently, she is working on her doctoral thesis, which aims to interdisciplinarily study the enmeshment of gender, sexuality, and race concepts into the experience and perception of textured hair in Poland. She holds a BA in linguistics and an MA in sociology and anthropology. In 2023, she received a Fulbright Graduate Award grant, which allowed her to pursue the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies master’s program at UAlbany, SUNY. She co-translated Judith Butler’s “The Public Futures of the Humanities” article for Teksty Drugie (2025).
Marcus Ángel Ochla is a BA graduate and a 1st year MA student in American Studies at the University of Warsaw. His research focuses on literature and film, especially Science Fiction and Weird Fiction. He is also interested in the cultural representations of neurodiversity and hidden disabilities.
Sebastian Smoliński is preparing his PhD dissertation about US film criticism and the construction of national identity at the University of Warsaw. He has contributed to several books, including One Shot Hitchcock (ed. M. Robson and L. Robinson, Oxford University Press, 2024). He was a recipient of the 2019/2020 Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship for teaching a history of Polish film at Cleveland State University in Ohio.
Joanna Szymaniak is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw. Currently, she is in her second year of PhD programme and she prepares a doctoral dissertation titled “Beyond Consent: Contemporary Literary Narratives of Sexual Violence and Consent” under the supervision of dr hab. Karolina Krasuska, prof. ucz. Her research explores gender theory, the dynamics of consent and sexual violence, as she analyzes how these issues are portrayed in popular culture and literature in the aftermath of the #MeToo Movement. Joanna is part of an international research team led by Prof. Tomasz Basiuk and Prof. Eveline Kilian (Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts; 2023-2026, National Science Center). Her work has been published in European Journal of American Studies (2026) and The New Americanist (2023).
Mikołaj Tkaczyk is an MA student in American Studies at the University of Warsaw and a graduate of Management at the same institution. His research focuses on the cultural and social aspects of disability, particularly identity, care, media, histories of institutionalization and activism, and embodiment in art. His current academic interests include crip lyricism and lived-experience narratives. Beyond academia, he has hosted a podcast titled “orzeczenie o” featuring conversations with disabled scholars, activists, and influencers, and has participated in many educational initiatives.
Symposium Organizing Committee: dr Ludmiła Janion, dr Anna Kurowicka, mgr Olga Gajek, mgr Julia Płaczkiewicz
Young Americanists’ Day Organizing Committee: dr Natalia Pamuła, dr Agnieszka Kotwasińska, mgr Maria Łusakowska
The conference is co-funded by the Excellence Initiative Research University (IDUB) program at the University of Warsaw.
ASC Anniversary Symposium is part of our 50th Anniversary Event Calendar.