Events

American Studies Colloquium Series

May 16: Haunted by Hill House: Shirley Jackson, Housewife Horrors and the Politics of Fame

March 27, 2019

In this lecture Patrycja Antoszek from the Catholic University of Lublin will talk about Shirley Jackson’s personal experiences as a mother, full-time housewife and wife of a famous literary critic, that inspired her highly provocative and original stories, dominated by the Gothic tropes of haunted heroines, enclosed spaces and female madness.

News

Anna Sosnowska’s book has been published by Central European University Press!

June 6, 2019

“This beautifully written and engaging book is a veritable intellectual feast. Not only does it bring the rich scholarly tradition of the Polish historiography of ‘backwardness’ and ‘development’ to bear on global discussions of economic inequality; it also offers an opportunity to rethink […]

American Studies Colloquium Series

April 25: Ghosts and Anchors: Translingualism in Contemporary US Poetry

March 27, 2019

This lecture considers translingualism as creative and dynamic experiment in contemporary U.S. poetry. Piotr Gwiazda from the University of Pittsburgh will discuss how it influences literary work of first- and second-generation immigrants to America.

Year 2018/2019

March 28: Crime Narratives in the Age of Trump: A Manifesto

March 27, 2019

In this talk David Schmid, from University at Buffalo, will argue that the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States provides the cultural critic in general and the cultural critic of crime narratives. For this purpose, he will examine a series of related issues about what televisual, filmic, and written narratives of crime from a variety of geographical and geopolitical spaces.

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 14: Defining State-Private Network. American Freedom Committees During the Cold War

March 14, 2019

In this lecture Anna Mazurkiewicz from the University of Gdańsk focuses on the fate of the political exiles who had left the Communist-dominated regions and entered into complex relations with the Americans during the Cold War.

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 7: Transnational Identities and Behaviors among Solidarity Refugees in the US

March 1, 2019

Mary Erdmans during the presentation outlines the political transnational activities and identities of Solidarity refugees in the United States (mainly Chicago and California) during the late 1980s. She also focuses on several factors influencing the return of the Solidarity refugees, who re-migrated to Poland after 1989.

American Studies Colloquium Series

February 28: The Diva Project: Analyzing Stardom in American Pop Culture

January 28, 2019

This presentation discusses the films Mahogany and Dreamgirls, as well as analyzes female super stars, such as Diana Ross, Whitney Houston and Beyonce in order to highlight the connection between on-screen and off-screen performance. Jaap Kooijman examines the common trope in African American female superstardom that commercial success comes at the expense of “authentic blackness.”

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 17: Nuclear Afterlives: Toxicity and Nonhuman Embodiments in the Anthropocene

January 17, 2019

In this talk Alison Sperling focuses on environmental records made legible in the Anthropocene, namely the radionuclides, as the result of nuclear fission and thermonuclear explosions in the biosphere, which have since inscribed themselves into all bodies, human and nonhuman, biological and geological alike. She will attempt to challenge what it might mean to flourish in and despite of a toxic Anthropocene.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 13: Humanities after Blackfish

December 13, 2018

Gerry Canavan in this talk discusses the anti-Sea-World documentary BLACKFISH, as a paradigmatic text of the Anthropocene and a fascinating story gesturing towards multiple possible futures for the relationship between humans and animals.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 6: Sensory Interface and Algorithmic Desire in a Society of Anticipation

December 6, 2018

The digitally enhanced capitalism promotes anticipatory experimentalism as a novel foundation of American morals, revealing that the provisional is the ultimate object of desire. This lecture demonstrates how the optimization-fixated sensory media algorithmically feed-forward the data, thus promulgating a forever accomplished future.

Year 2018/2019

December 5: The Promised Land of American Integration

December 5, 2018

Ryszard Piasecki, a professor of the University of Lodz, and a former Ambassador to Chile, will discuss the myth of the integration in America as the so-called Promised Land.

American Studies Colloquium Series

November 22: Ethnography of New Culinary Elites: Gastronomic Heritage, Gender and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Oaxaca

November 22, 2018

This presentation focuses on the rise of new culinary female elites in Oaxaca to present the role female cooks play in the process of heritagization of local foodways.

Year 2018/2019

November 21: Environmental Issues of Indigenous People in Canada

November 21, 2018

According to Amnesty International, despite living in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, Indigenous families and communities in Canada continue to face widespread impoverishment, inadequate housing, food insecurity, ill-health and unsafe drinking water.

Year 2018/2019

November 14: US and Current Affairs

November 14, 2018

A lecture by Frank J. Finver, a Public Affairs Officer at the US Embassy.

American Studies Colloquium Series

November 8: The Rise and Fall of Atlantic Capitalism

November 8, 2018

This lecture explains how work, space and money have become the pillars of capitalism – a system that is now becoming a thing of the past, giving the audience a mirror in which they can look at themselves from a new, global perspective.