dr Joanna Mąkowska
Joanna Mąkowska holds a PhD in American Literature and is an Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century literature in the United States and Canada, poetry and poetics, documentary writing, protest literature and culture, environmental studies, feminist theory, and assemblage theories. She has published in Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, Women’s Studies, and James Baldwin Review, among other venues. Her work also appeared in many edited collections, most recently in The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the State University of New York at Buffalo (2017-2018) and a Kosciuszko Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Duquesne University (2021-2022). In 2025, she was awarded the Ministry of Science and Higher Education Scholarship for Outstanding Young Researchers.
A recipient of the National Science Center “SONATA” grant (2024-2027), she is currently working on a book that examines modernist and contemporary documentary poetics in relation to new materialist assemblage theory and protest literature. She is also a literary critic and translator. Recently, she brought into Polish Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, earning a nomination for the Ossolineum Prize for Best Poetry Translation, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
Roles in the ASC
Academic Reading in Practice Co-coordinator
Academic Writing Coordinator (BA and MA)
ASC Writing Lab Coordinator
Member of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group
Achievements
Ministry of Science and Higher Education Scholarship for Outstanding Young Researchers (2025-2028)
National Science Center (NCN) Grant SONATA for the project “A Form of Protest: Documentary Assemblages in American Poetry,” 2024-2027
Clifford and Mary Corbridge Trust Fellowship, University of Cambridge, Robinson College, July-August 2023, July-August 2022
The Kosciuszko Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Duquesne University, 2021-2022
Fulbright Junior Research Award, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2017-2018
European Association for American Studies Postgraduate Travel Grant, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2015
Publications
“Reading ‘Staggerlee Wonders’ Today: James Baldwin’s Poetics of Social Justice,” co-authored with Marta Werbanowska. In The Routledge Companion to James Baldwin, eds. Yasmine DeGout, Anna Pochmara, and Tyechia L. Thompson, forthcoming 2026.
“Adrienne Rich.” In The Encyclopedia of Social Justice in Education. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026.
“The Architecture of Love in the Poetic Thinking of James Baldwin and Jericho Brown,” James Baldwin Review 9 no. 1 (2023): 70-88.
“Mina Loy’s Nomadic Politics of Pain,” Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 7 cycle 3 “Body Politic in Pain” cluster (2023).
“Embodiment as an ‘Ongoing Formal Experience’”: New Materialist Encounters with Ecopoetics.” In The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, edited by Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Christine Okoth, Bernard Quetchenbach, 67-79. New York: Routledge, 2023.
“‘Begin with the Material’: Adrienne Rich’s Nomadic Poetics.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 78, no. 2 (2022): 43-67.
“Poetic thinking in the Anthropocene,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 50, no. 8 (2021): 791-797.
“Korpor(e)alna materialność i nomadyczna podmiotowość według Rosi Braidotti.” Po humanizmie. Od technokrytyki do animal studies, edited by Zuzanna Ładyga and Justyna Włodarczyk. 138-155. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, 2016 (in Polish).
Courses (selected)
American Campus Novel
North American Fiction Today
American Protest Literature
North American Literature and Ecology
Documentary Forms in American Poetry and Film
American Literary Reportage
American Digital Literary Archives
Thinking with Literature: Theory and Practice
Hobbies/non-academic interests
yoga vinyasa, hiking and swimming, US travels