Ulla Urszula Chowaniec: research, lectures, events, projects (academic profile)July 2026 Debrecen — University of Debrecen, conference “Global Screen Media in Eastern Europe, Eastern European Screen Media Abroad.” Paper: “Lesbians as a Metaphorical Threat to the Heteronormative National Order: Cinema, Politics, and Queer Excess in Eastern Europe since the 1980s.”
May 20-21, 2026: Participating in the AWSS conference in Riga in May 2026, where she presented her work and took part in conversations on women in Slavic studies, literature, art, and cultural memory.
AWSS: https://awsshome.org/membership/ Paper: on Ines Rychlik's art in the Black protests “Maternal Futures under Constraint: Artistic Activism, Reproductive Citizenship, and Feminist Rehearsal in the All-Poland Women’s Strike.” It began from Iness Rychlik’s image The Edge of Subtlety (2020), which you used as a visual and theoretical threshold for thinking about the Polish abortion protests. You read the image — the white garment, red stain, exposed body, and wire hanger — as a powerful critique of Poland’s near-total abortion ban and as a feminist intervention into the mythology of Matka Polka. From April 2026 - REMS project on Visualising Invisible (three-year project funded by NCN, National Centre for Science in Poland)
Visualizing the Invisible: The Maternal Turn in Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Central Europe An OPUS-28/LAP research project carried out by the Research and Education in Maternal Studies network, with partners from Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The project is led by Justyna Wierzchowska at the University of Warsaw, Zuzana Štefková at Charles University, and Jordan Troeller at Leuphana University Lüneburg. It analyses contemporary artistic and curatorial practices that articulate the lived and situated experience of mothering in Central Europe, especially after the 1989 transformation, while also considering Cold War precedents. The project focuses on how artists, art collectives, curators, and institutions engage with the physical, psychological, social, and political aspects of having and rearing children. Using critical feminist theory, it examines how maternal art and curatorship challenge oppressive stereotypes, nationalistic discourses, and institutionalised concepts of motherhood, instead drawing attention to non-essentialized, non-normative, and marginalised maternal experiences. June 2026 — Fourth workshop and short writing retreat of the Gilgulot / Ravensbrück Archive project, “Incomplete But Not Irrelevant: Analysing Neglected Material in the ‘Ravensbrück Archive,’” Hotell Mossbylund, Skivarp. Participants: Victoria Van Orden Martínez, Malin Thor Tureby, Urszula Chowaniec, Britta Geschwind, and Sylwia Szymańska-Smolkin.
February 19, 2026 https://www.humanrights.lu.se/calendar/what-unpublished-archives-can-tell-us-literature-history-and-work-library What Unpublished Archives Can Tell Us: Literature, History and the Work of the Library?
October 1, 2025 - Jewish Festival in Klaipeda. Lecture on Yiddish Women Writers.
July 21- 25, 2025 - LONDON ICCEES Conference https://www.iccees2025.org/
June 2025 - Conference in Polin "1945: Not the End, Not the Beginning"
May 2025 - Małgorzata Dawidek in Lund.
May 2025 - story of The Bund, Jewish Workers' Movement and Ecology. The events with the activist, the poet and the PhD researcher at Lund University
Archiving podcast:
Podcast SNACK Sztokholmskie Konwersacje
Ula's podcast in Polish on cultural events and Polish-Swedish connections, with a writer Katarzyna Tubylewicz Snack You Tube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-riso9y6PDo
Website https://snackkasiiuli.weebly.com April 2025 - Divergent Narratives | Rozbieżne narracje: Identity, Politics, and Home in Contemporary Polish Literature https://www.sol.lu.se/polska/divergent-narratives/
Two-Day Seminar at Lund University. Organisation and curating by Ulla Chowaniec Autumn, 2024 - About Irena Klepfisz's recent publications:
In Geveb here: Etlekhe verter vegn Irena Klepfisz and her poetry - Analysis published in In Geveb. Link Zenia Marcinkowska Larsson Exhibition
August 25, 2024 - October 24, 20024 Wystawa Urszuli Ulli Chowaniec (kuratorka) o szwedzkiej pisarce, rzeźbiarce Zeni Marcinkowskiej Larsson (Galeria Bałucka, Łódź, Poland) Zenia Marcinkowska Larsson Sculptures, Words, Memory. May 16, 2024, Mifgash Project Yiddish Women Writers. Worshkshop coorganized by Paideia and Oshpitsin Museum in Oświęcim.
April 5-7, 2024, BASEES Cambridge Annual Meeting of Slavic Studies
March 26, 2024: Official opening of the project Lider: Musical Tributes: https://lidermusicaltributes.com/
January, 2024 Lund, Conference on Women nd Girls in Concentration Camps, organized by Prof. Barbara Törquist Plewa and Joanna Michlic
Paper on: Zenia Marcinkowska Larssson and her correspondance with Chava Rosenfarb. November, 2023: Limmud Stockholm https://limmud.se/na-sessions/the-correspondence-of-two-jewish-women-writers-the-post-holocaust-lives-of-chava-rosenfarb-and-zenia-larsson/
June 13-15, 2023 UCL.Challenging the Binary: Non-Binary, Genderqueer, and Gender-Neutral Language. Paper: Polish language as a Non-Binary Language.
May 23, 2023 at 20.00/8pm: Online talk: Rescue Acts and Rescue Dynamics: Stories of Older Jewish Child Survivors from Poland 1945 - 1949 with prof. Joanna Michlic
FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/926201138588654 Registration: https://www.cognitoforms.com/Paideia1/RescueActsAndRescueDynamics235?fbclid=IwAR0QmQrWrekLO3Dn_kbaLzMC7OVU_bpmjZWf01tTYYxYwPsSeQyuHaH0EvU May (18-19) 2023: Power Relations in Language: On Queering Language in the Polish vs. English Contexts. A Comparative Discussion. https://crisis.confer.uj.edu.pl/urszula-chowaniec
March - June 2023: Events, organised by Urszula Ula Chowaniec at Paideia European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden MORE INFORMATION at Ula's https://jewishwomenswriting.weebly.com/events-2023.html This Spring, within the seminars on the Yiddish Language in Translation, we has organized four extraordinary events: 21 March, 2023 - on women’s writing (Goldie Morgentaler and Frieda Forman, March 21) 18 April, 2023 - on Yiddish literature and war, also commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Sheva Zucker, April 18). FB https://www.facebook.com/events/600268475058938 and direct link to registration form: https://www.cognitoforms.com/Paideia1/YiddishLiteratureOfTheHolocaust174?fbclid=IwAR1Ogc7QEPZbMW8E4afYHQpFYnd-GET2d7xr0v_LTYSxAAPhgFqLht5rZBg 23 May, 2023 - on children and war (Joanna Michlic, May 23) see above 1 June, 2023 and on Yiddish literature in Poland after WW2 (Magdalena Ruta, June 1) registration soon March 2023: Interview with a poet Irena Klepfisz about her new book Her Birth and Later Years, about the history of the lesbian press in America, Queer identity and activism, all intertwined with poetry. LISTEN
Description: In this intimate podcast, Irena Klepfisz talks about her new book, creativity and resistance, coming out, and her experience of being a lesbian Jew in New York in the 70s and 80s. Through her exclusive conversation with Ula Chowaniec, she shares personal memories and touches upon the lesbian activist and literally movements of her time, how political urgencies shaped her thinking, her relationship with Yiddish, while she recites some of her groundbreaking poems. Irena Klepfisz is a feminist, lesbian and secular Jewish poet, Yiddish translator and teacher of Jewish Women Studies. She is the author of Her Birth and Later Years, Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue and Dreams of an Insomniac. Ula (Urszula) Chowaniec is a Research Honorary Fellow at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The podcast is part of the Lavender Languages Institute programme of the Pickle Bar. The program is supported by Bezirkskulturfonds by the department of Art and Culture of the Bezirksamts Mitte von Berlin. Audio editing by Norbert Lang https://slavsandtatars-picklebar.com/Podcasts 20 February 2023 at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies at 5:00 pm–7:00 pm (UK time)
Spotting Power-Relations in the Sentence: On Queering Language in the Polish vs English Contexts Event: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/events/2023/feb/spotting-power-relations-sentence-queering-language-polish-vs-english-contexts Booking: https://ucl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwude2qqTooH9frrXjOJLok_o4axWbJq6Xz From December 2023: Inauguration of the project let by prof. Ramona Gonczol, PROLang, seminars on language, culture linguistic and politics at University College London. With my participation and full support. About ProLang and forthcoming events here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/news-events/seminar-series/prolang
21. February, 2023: Lecture/ talk on Queering language in comparative Polish vs English contexts with Shaun Foley, SSEES UCL. January 2023: członkini Rady Naukowej czasopisma AUTOBIOGRAFIA https://wnus.edu.pl/au/pl/page/editorial
Autobiografia: Literatura, Kultura, Media January - April 2023: Grant for the project Yiddish Poetry to Songs. Creating a music and song representation of selected poems by Celia Dropkin, Kadia Molodowski, Anna Margolin, Rokhl Korn and others (Janiary-April 2023) at Paideia Folkhögskola, Sweden.
Grudzień 2022:
Konferencja Wszystko o Czułości. All About Tenderness Information website: https://konferencjakonteksty.ka.edu.pl/materialy-video-z-konferencji Rozmowa z Agnieszką Holland (rozmawiają Urszula Ula Chowaniec i Anna Taszycka): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2wrwjQVUIs&t=1s (film poniżej) Raport filmowy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cUZzsTeQIQ&t=71s (film poniżej)
 Conference is about to begin: François Guesnet, co-organiser of the conference, Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, December 2019
 Credits: Małgorzata Dawidek, 2019
As an Amos Oz Fellow and I am working on the long term project devoted to the Jewish women's writing and art in the 1920s and 1930s and its memory in today's culture
JIDISKA FÖRSAMLINGEN I STOCKHOLM
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ON ULLA'S RESEARCH COURSES. SEMINARS TALKS FESTIVALS INITIATIVES CONFERENCESUlla (Urszula) Chowaniec, PhD., Urszula Chowaniec lives in Stockholm and lectures in Polish Studies at Lund University. She is also a Professor at Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski University in Kraków, Poland. She develops and teaches new courses on Jewish women’s literature and Yiddish women writers at Paideia Folkhögskola in Stockholm, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She worked at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies between 2011 and 2019, and also studied at UCL, where she led a series of seminars on gender, culture, and festivals.
She is the author of the monograph Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015) and of a monograph on the novels of Irena Krzywicka, a Jewish feminist writer of the 1930s: W poszukiwaniu kobiety: O wczesnych powieściach Ireny Krzywickiej (In Search of a Woman: Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka, Kraków, 2007). She is also the editor of the special issue of Central Europe: “Queering Poland.” Her research focuses on Jewish history, Yiddish culture, Jewish identity, women’s writing, and contemporary literature. She is currently working on a monograph on the poetry of the lesbian Jewish poet Irena Klepfisz. Her broader interests include artistic and curatorial practices, especially those connected with memory, women’s archives, Jewish heritage, visual culture, and the intersections between literature, art, and public history. (https://jewishwomenswriting.weebly.com). 
See also previous project on Women's Online Writing and follow the valuable materials:
Ula's courses and teaching materials:
Researcher and organiser: prof. nadzw. dr hab. Urszula (Ula) Chowaniec
[email protected] [email protected] key words: women's writing, identity and memory, gender, queer, language, LGBTQ, contemporary women's fiction, the notion of foreigner, YIDDISH WOMEN WRITERS, Jewish contemporary identity, POLAND AND EASTERN EUROPE, melancholy, the body, identity, migration, travelling, displacement,
languages of exclusions and discrimination |
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1670-9850
Today's world needs transgression from the growing level of inequality and injustice to significantly new space. We have invited artists and activists for to discuss the centenary of women's emancipation is a centenary which mirrors the peoples' struggle to get rid of many injustices arising from gender inequality. #100yearssowhat #fminism #emancipation #feministart #womensart SEE also info about related events organised by Ula Chowaniec: https://impactsofgender.weebly.com/july-events-role-of-the-past-and-role-of-anger.html 
11-12 June, 2018: Impacts of Gender Discourses in Poland, an international two-days conference devoted to the gender, LGBTQ, body politics in Europe with Polish Focus (funded by Noble Oxford Foundation). Contact: Ula Chowaniec [email protected]
Here: you can also follow the information about the monograph on Polish contemporary women's writing (Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Polish Contemporary Women's Writing, 2015) as well as the event withing the project of electronic era, literature, culture, gender and migration eMigrating Landscapes as well as have a look at the online journal Women Online Writing
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Projects supported among others by:
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