Tag Archive: events
Year 2024/2025
May 22: Bitburg, Ratification, and Implementation of the Genocide Convention by the US
May 16, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to a lecture by Professor Joe Delap from Athens State University, who will present a lecture titled “Bitburg, Ratification, and Implementation of the Genocide Convention by the US”. The presentation delves into the history of the US’s role in the Convention, discusses US-European dealings prompting Senate ratification, and concludes by looking at what difference, if any, US ratification has made in assessing, investigating, and prosecuting genocide in the International Criminal Court.
Year 2024/2025
May 20: History with a Twist: Exploring Fantasy and Alternate Realities in My Lady Jane
May 14, 2025
Join us for a penultimate Weird meeting, a lecture by Nicole Bryjka (University of Warsaw) on fantasy and alternate history in television series My Lady Jane!
Year 2024/2025
May 13: Cultural Translation: Soviet Jewishness Between the USSR and America
May 4, 2025
We have the pleasure to invite you for a guest lecture by Prof. Sasha Senderovich (University of Washington) who will be in conversation with Prof. Karolina Krasuska (University of Warsaw), titled „Cultural Translation: Soviet Jewishness between the USSR and America.” This event is a part of the UW Excellence Initiative Mentor Program „Theorizing the Cold War for Cultural Studies”
Year 2024/2025
April 29: Feminism and Gender Representations in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
April 29, 2025
Join us for a lecture by Agata Zygardowicz on Buffy and her iconic impact on American television: “Feminism and Gender Representations in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer occupies a significant space in the history of feminist media, portraying themes of 1990s third-wave feminism, postfeminist aesthetics, and television genre for teens. This lecture examines how the series both reflects and critiques feminist ideals, offering a protagonist who is emotionally vulnerable, fashion-conscious, and physically powerful at the same time.
Year 2024/2025
April 15: “Becoming the Horror” – Interactive Movies as the Perfect Horror Medium
April 10, 2025
Weird Fiction Research Group kindly invites you to the fourth Weird TV meeting in spring semester. We’re continuing the subject of the game/TV relationship with Dominik Kędzierawski’s lecture about (among others) Until Dawn and Bandersnatch – “Becoming the Horror – Interactive Movies as the Perfect Horror Medium”!
Year 2024/2025
March 25: Don’t Adjust the TV: TV Heads and Television Nightmares in Horror Video Games
March 25, 2025
On the heels of a meeting about horror in children’s films we’re switching gears to video games! Join Weird Fiction Research Group for “Don’t Adjust the TV: TV Heads and Television Nightmares in Horror Video Games”. In this presentation, we will explore the evolution of TV Head monsters in gaming, arguing that their prominence reflects the medium’s deep-rooted preoccupation with film.
American Studies Colloquium Series
May 15: The Science and Art of Nabokov’s Atmospherics
May 7, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This time we are pleased to host Anindita Banerjee, whose work focuses on science fiction studies, environmental studies, media studies, and migration studies in Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin and African Americas.
American Studies Colloquium Series
April 3: Gatekeeping, Paranoid Professionalism, and Redefining Literacy: How US Librarians Fought, Found, and Loved Comic Books
April 3, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to the third lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! In this talk, we will look at how US librarians fought against comic books as though libraries were the last line of defense in a vital war. We will examine the existential threat that librarians perceived comics to pose in the mid-century and the gradual, nervous thawing of that opposition in the 1970s and 1980s.
American Studies Colloquium Series
April 24: The Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections on Damaged Life
April 24, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to the fourth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This time we welcome Jonathan Alexander with a lecture titled “The Minima Moralia of Autotheory: New Reflections on Damaged Life”.
Year 2024/2025
24 Marca: Dlaczego Amerykanie Zaufali Szarlatanom? Klub Amerykański #1: Anna Kurowicka i Elżbieta Korolczuk
March 24, 2025
Kim są uzdrawiacze ciał i na czym polega ich fenomen? Z czym wiąże się rosnąca popularność szarlatanów, uzdrowicieli i handlarzy wątpliwymi suplementami diety? Dlaczego USA wypisały się z WHO, a sekretarzem ds. zdrowia w administracji Donalda Trumpa został człowiek, który uważa, że miał w mózgu robaka? Na te inne pytania spróbujemy odpowiedzieć podczas pierwszego spotkania Klubu Amerykańskiego w Księgarni Czarnego. Okazją do dyskusji będzie wydany niedawno nakładem Wydawnictwa Czarne reportaż „Inwazja uzdrawiaczy ciał” Matthew Hongoltz-Hetlinga (przeł. Hanna Pasierska), a przewodniczkami po świecie amerykańskiej alternatywnej medycyny będą Elżbieta Korolczuk i Anna Kurowicka z Ośrodka Studiów Amerykańskich Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
American Studies Colloquium Series
March 20: Limits to/of Representation: Intersectional and Gender-Based Violence in Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River
March 20, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to the second lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This time, we are joined by Dr Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová of Charles University, who will offer a nuanced analysis of Taylor Sheridan’s directorial debut Wind River through the categories of representation as inclusion and representation as portrayal.
Year 2024/2025
March 18: Horror in Kids’s Movies
March 18, 2025
Weird Fiction Research Group kindly invites you to the third Weird TV meeting in spring semester. ASC student, Julia Michalak, will introduce you into the subject of Horror in Kids’s Movies!
Year 2024/2025
March 14: SPLOT Artemis Generation Open Event: To Boldly Go Or Not: Human Futures in Space
March 14, 2025
After a decades-long slowdown of extra-terrestrial exploration, humanity seems poised to return to space. Some visions of this return are very ambitious, but much remains unclear about the feasibility, the scope, and the cost of expanding beyond the third planet from the Sun. To think through these (and other) aspects through the lens of science fiction, space psychology, design and architecture, SPLOT Artemis Generation in collaboration with the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, is hosting a discussion panel featuring Dr. Joanna Jurga, Dr. Agnieszka Skorupa, and Prof. Sherryl Vint and moderated by Prof. Paweł Frelik.
Year 2024/2025
March 13: Anachronistic Retrofuturism and the Cosmic Indifference of the Workplace
March 13, 2025
This talk centers the anachronistic office work setting and technologies of the tv series Severance (2022–) to argue that the series exemplifies the aesthetic techniques of the Weird even as it reorients the site of horror from the indifference of the universe to the sociopathy of neoliberal capitalism. If the original concept of Weird Fiction stressed the impotence of human beings within a universe ruled by forces that greatly exceed our power and that are, at best, indifferent to our fate, Severance confirms that these forces are, worse, malign as it locates them in the corporate priorities of the tech company Lumon Industries and its reduction of humans to human capital.
American Studies Colloquium Series
March 6: Bending Reality to Economics
March 6, 2025
We are delighted to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This talk examines the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data.
Year 2024/2025
February 25: Immortality in Televised Media – The Negative Sides of Being a (Super?)human
February 25, 2025
Join us for the second Weird TV lecture in 2025! Immortality as a concept has existed since ancient times, but unlike then, the term nowadays is rarely connected to chasing eternal youth or extending one’s life indefinitely. The concept of immortality in contemporary popular culture, propagated often through TV shows for children and adolescents alike, is usually connected with superheroes and the supernatural in general. Portrayed mostly as invincibility or ability to sustain damage that would otherwise kill a regular human, the focus is put on the physical sides of this concept, rarely on the mental side of being immortal. Death, after all, awaits everyone in the end, it is ingrained into human culture. As a species, we are drawn as much to creating, as we are to destroying, including ourselves.