Doctoral Students

Doctoral Students

Aleksandra Zuzanna Leniarska is a PhD researcher at the University of Warsaw’s Doctoral School for Humanities in the discipline of literature. She received the Fulbright Junior Research Award and spent the 2021-22 academic year at Stanford University working in the Stanford Literary Lab (one of the leading centers for computational literary studies) with Professor Mark Algee-Hewitt. She is also a graduate of Stanford’s Digital Humanities Research Scholars Residency, where she was developing the computational part of her dissertation. In her doctoral project, Return to Realism? Comparing American Novel of 19th and 21st centuries, she combines close and distant reading to analyze the resemblances of the contemporary American novel to 19th century realism, especially in the context of their treatment of capitalism, social class, and domesticity. Her research interests include contemporary literature, theory of the novel, digital humanities and sociology of literature. She has a background in English, French, and Spanish language and culture studies. She is a Humanity in Action Fellow, having completed the John Lewis Fellowship on racism and social justice. She published multiple articles on American culture in Wysokie Obcasy magazine. [full profile]

Aleksandra Julia Malinowska (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities. Her PhD project Affective Poetics: Manifestos and Women’s Rhetorical Strategies 1970-2020, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Karolina Krasuska, is funded by the National Science Center (PRELUDIUM BIS 4). The main objective of the project is to construct a non-linear genealogy of women’s movement manifestos: one that emphasizes the ongoing radical potential of women’s rhetorics at a moment conventionally thought to be dominated by neoliberal feminism. It also conducts a cross-generational literary analysis of select manifestos, focusing on the ways in which affective poetics are used to shape their political potential for mobilizing resistance. 

Aleksandra is a graduate of the American Studies Center, collaborator of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group and one of the coordinators and founding members of its Student Chapter. She has also worked on the international research grant Queer Theory in Transit led by Prof. Tomasz Basiuk and Prof. Eveline Kilian, studying the reception and application of “queer time” theory by Polish academics. Most recently, she attended the 2025 MLA convention and spent the spring semester at Arizona State University on a research fellowship funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). [full profile]

Alicja Relidzyńska is a PhD candidate at the UW Doctoral School of Humanities. Her current research focuses on the environmental humanities. In her dissertation, she explores the twenty-first-century mode of nostalgia shaped by the growing awareness of the climate crisis, as reflected in U.S. American (audio)visual culture. She serves as the Warsaw Science Festival Coordinator at the ASC and is a member of both the Institute of the Americas and Europe Council and the Discipline Scientific Council for Cultural and Religious Studies and Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She has been awarded the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Graduate Student Scholarship and the IDUB grant for the preparation of a doctoral dissertation in accordance with the “Humanities: Crossing Borders, Extending Capabilities” theme. Her works have appeared in the European Journal of American Culture, Text Matters, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of American Studies, and Film Quarterly. [full profile]

Anna Maria Grzybowska is a PhD student at the University of Warsaw’s Doctoral School of the Humanities. In 2021, she earned her M.A. degree with honors in American Studies (American Studies Center, UW), with a thesis examining the representation of psychological violence in speculative films. Dedicated to exploring various (not-only-)human ways of experiencing the world, her current research investigates speculative fiction as a space for reimagining the human in relation to the complexities of the nonhuman. Her dissertation-in-progress focuses on speculative visions of human-animal futures, particularly how literature, film, and video games narrate and imaginatively transform (or reinforce) the animal-industrial complex. Since 2022, she has been teaching BA-level courses at the American Studies Center, focusing on essential academic skills, American literature, and Animal Studies. [full profile]

Anna Temel is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw, where she previously earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in American Studies. Furthermore, she studied at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom through a scholarship, concentrating on digital feminism and modern art. Anna’s PhD centers around the subversion of gender and sexual normativity in speculative video games. She specializes in analyzing texts of popular culture through a perspective of posthumanism, gender studies, and queer theory. Throughout her academic career, Anna has published articles centered around feminist criticism and queer analysis of films and literature and delivered numerous conference talks covering a wide range of topics, including feminist music, digital activism, participatory culture within gaming communities, and the interplay of gender and technology. [full profile]

Jagoda Tyczyńska is a BA and MA graduate of the ASC, and is currently completing her PhD in literary studies at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw. Her research project focuses on the depictions of interracial and cross-ethnic body swapping in Western science fiction alongside their effects on the discourse and politics of race. In 2022 she received first prize for the “Best American Studies Master’s Thesis Written at a Polish University” for her MA thesis “Liberal Representations of the Working-Class in Post-2010 American Cinema.” Her current research interests include film, American popular culture, ethnic studies, and speculative fiction. [full profile]

Joanna Kaniewska holds M. A. degrees from the Chair of Japanese Studies (Faculty of Oriental Studies, 2016) and the American Studies Center (2019), University of Warsaw. She is also a graduate of the Gender Studies post-graduate program at the Polish Academy of Science (2022). She enrolled at The Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw, in 2023, and she is currently working on her dissertation, tentatively titled “American Witch Textualities: Reclaiming the Past, Reinventing the Future.” Her current academic interests include American and Japanese popular culture, speculative fiction, popular music, temporalities, gender and queer studies. She is also a translator from English and Japanese, specializing in audiovisual and literary translations. [full profile]

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Joanna Szymaniak is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw. Her main research interests focus on gender studies and the analysis of contemporary film and literature in the context of consent and sexual violence. She is currently preparing a doctoral dissertation titled Beyond Consent: Contemporary Literary Narratives of Sexual Violence and Consent, under the supervision of Professor Karolina Krasuska. Her research explores gender theory, the dynamics of consent, and shifting representations of power and identity, analyzing how these issues are portrayed in popular culture and literature in the aftermath of the #MeToo era. Joanna is a member of the Queer Studies Student Collective, which was recently awarded a mini-grant to establish an international student working group focused on queer theory. The project aims to foster horizontal learning through shared research while exploring European alternatives to the US-centric queer studies canon. She is also an affiliated member of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group and has participated in numerous conferences, symposia, and workshops related to queer and gender studies. Her first publication appeared in The New Americanist in 2024. [full profile]

Julia Płaczkiewicz holds a BA and MA from the ASC and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Warsaw. Her research project examines representations of female rage in post-#MeToo audiovisual culture, with a particular focus on reparative reading and the politics of affect. Her chapter, “The Horror of Grief: Monstrous Effects of Unaddressed Grief in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook,” appears in the volume Grief, Identity, and the Arts: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Expressions of Grief. Her MA thesis, “The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend: Origins, Politics, and Limitations of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Trope in Contemporary American Cinema,” was awarded Second Prize for the “Best Polish Master’s Thesis in the Field of American Studies” by the Polish Association for American Studies. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, postfeminism, affect theory, and horror studies. [full profile]

Olga Gajek is a BA and MA graduate of the ASC, and is currently doing her PhD in Culture and Religion Studies at the Doctoral School of Humanities. Her main academic focus is body representation in cinema and TV, especially in the horror genre and exploitation film. She wrote her BA on female heroines of Blaxploitation cinema, while in her MA she focused on depictions of teenage sexuality in American film. In her PhD project, she researches representation of non-normative bodies and minds in contemporary body horror. Her academic interests include: cultural disability studies, cultural gerontology, gender & sexuality, biopolitics, popular culture, and mad studies. She is particularly interested in niche genres, such as hagsploitation, so-called B movies, and erotic thrillers, in which she analyzes the enfreakment of disability, female sexuality, and aging. [full profile]

Orkhan Aghayev is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw, specializing in Culture and Religion Studies. He earned his MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Łódź, where his thesis examined Beyoncé’s artistry as a tool for decolonization. He has presented this research, with a focus on its political dimensions and its engagement with decolonial imaginaries in literary and urban contexts, at academic events in Poland and internationally. His current research explores the role of music videos by women artists in conservative, post-Soviet societies, examining how these cultural productions challenge and subvert the colonial legacy of the Soviet Union. His academic interests include postcolonial studies, gender, identity, cultural theory, and pop culture. [full profile]

Roman Vasylenko is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities at the University of Warsaw. Under the supervision of Professor Tomasz Basiuk, he is writing a thesis dedicated to American novelist Stephen Wright entitled “Stephen Wright’s Late Postmodernism and the Anxiety of Influence.” Roman co-translated into Polish Thomas Pynchon’s short story collection, Slow Learner (1984) and his two essays, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” (1984) and “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee” (1993). [full profile]