dr Marta Usiekniewicz

Americanist with a Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw, Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center. Her research interests cover gender and sexuality studies, feminism, as well as bodies in culture and art. Her scholarship is intersectional, focusing on gender, class, race, and ability. In 2014 she was the recipient of the Fulbright Junior Research Award. She co-taught one of the first courses on disability studies at the University of Warsaw, and published in InterAlia‘s special issue on disability and illness, Ugly Bodies: Queer Perspectives on Illness, Disability, and Aging. She co-edited, with Natalia Pamuła and Magdalena Szarota, a special issue of Studia de Cultura devoted to disability studies in Poland. Her new book, Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction has been published by Palgrave in 2023. She is the co-host of the podcast “Oswoić gender.”

Role at the ASC

OZN Coordinator
BA Freshers Counselor
Co-Organizer of the American Studies Colloquium Series
Co-chair of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group

Achievements

Grant awarded by the State Fund for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled (PFRON) “Niepełnosprawność w humanistyce” 2019 for a research project entitled “Crip Appetites: Crip Theory and Critical Food Studies in American Graphic Novels”

Fulbright Junior Advanced Research Award in 2014 at the State University New York at Buffalo

Publications

with Anna Kurowicka. “Fat Girl’s Wet Dream: Girl Sexuality, Fatness, and Mental Disability in My Mad Fat Diary,” Fat Studies, 2019.

“‘Success to crime,’ or Sam Spade’s Consumption Habits in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: Consumption and Control,” in Food and Drink in Contexts, edited by Paweł Hamera, Andrzej Kuropatnicki, Artur Piskorz, 117-150. Krakow: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2019.

with Natalia Pamuła, and Magdalena Szarota. “Nic o nas bez nas,” Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia de Cultura 10(1)/2018: 4-13. 

“Dangerous Bodies: Blackness, Fatness and the Masculinity Dividend,” InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies Special Issue “Ugly bodies: Queer perspectives on illness, disability, and aging”,(11a/2016): 19-45.

 “The Eating Detective: Food and Masculinity in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser Series,” in Crime Scenes; Modern Crime Fiction in an International Context, edited by Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish and Urszula Eliasz. Warsaw: Peter Lang, 2014.

Courses (selected)

Not Just Cheap Thrills: American Crime Fiction and Film

Bodies in (Pop)Culture and Society

Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies

#metoo and #BlackLivesMatter in the Light of Academic Debates over Cultural Recognition

Food Matters: Introduction to American Food Studies from a cultural and social perspectives

The New Normal?: Normativity and Deviance in American Culture and Society

Disability in Contemporary and Twentieth Century American Culture