PUBLICATIONSTeaching experience |
Prof. nadzw. dr hab. Urszula Chowaniec
I am working as a Professor in the Department of Management and Social Communication at the Andrzej Frycz Modrzeweski University of Krakow, and simultaneously, I am conducting research within an affiliation to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College London.
In Stockholm I work in the Paideia, the Jewish High School, Paideia Folkshöhskola, teaching Jewish women's literature and Yiddish literature in translation. My main academic interests embrace three closely interrelated subjects, which I have been covered in a critically comparative and combined perspective. The first strand of my research is concerned with the literary, film and media analysis of both interwar and contemporary Polish culture (occasionally, Eastern European culture more broadly). The second strand of my research is framed by the development and application of gender critiques and the exploration of the category of identity. The third strand of my work is devoted to the critical intersections of these two strands with the study of Jewish history, culture and identity, once more, within a Polish context. More specifically, and for the last twenty years, I have concentrated on the examination of gendered concepts in communication, languages of manipulation, and discourses of discrimination, as well as the application of feminist theory on Polish and Central Eastern European cultural history, both at the present time and during the interwar period. This strand of my research has yielded several works, of which three volumes are particularly representative: Melancholic Migrating Bodies: Contemporary Polish Women’s Writing (2015), W poszukiwaniu kobiety. O wczesnych powieściach Ireny Krzywickiej (2007), and Women’s Voices and Feminism in Polish Cultural History (2012) – see the accompanying CV and list of publications for further details about these and all other texts. The current focus of my research is the role played by contemporary media in (re)creating images of the past (war and post-war memories). The impact of new social media and communication have been of growing importance in my research, which is increasingly devoted to the analysis of language and the generation of specific narratives of memory and the self. From this interest comes my article on the use of the category of “gender” during the so-called ‘war on gender’ campaign, started by Polish Catholic circles in 2012-14 (“The Quest for the ‘Normal’ Family,” 2018). Alongside these themes, and from 2018 onwards, my work has concentrated on different aspects of Women’s Jewish Secular Identity in interwar Eastern Europe (mainly within the Jewish Workers Organisation, or BUND), and its development since War World II. Here, I have combined work on Jewish memory and historical studies with the study of identity in the close reading of literary texts. For this I was also able to join Paideia, the European School in Modern Jewish Studies in Stockholm, for a fully-funded one-year programme, which has enabled me to deepen my exploration of Jewish history and culture, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish languages, in considerable depth, culminating in a current project called “Rebellious Jewish Women and Their Identities: Memory and Literature”. Hand in hand with this project, I am currently preparing a new project for the National Centre for Science (from December 2020): a critical biography of Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczyk, through her works and reception. |