It is our pleasure to inform the ASC community that Filip Boratyn, our doctoral student and – at the same time – USOS office assistant, is a recipient of the 2020 David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Originally founded in 1987 as the Graduate Student Award and renamed in 2016 to honor the late David. G. Hartwell, the award has been given annually to a graduate student submitting the most outstanding paper at the Association’s conference. Filip is the first recipient from Poland
and Central/Eastern Europe to receive the award. Congratulations, Filip!
American Studies Colloquium Series
March 20: Limits to/of Representation: Intersectional and Gender-Based Violence in Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River
March 12, 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 14: SPLOT Artemis Generation Open Event: To Boldly Go Or Not: Human Futures in Space
March 11, 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 5, 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.
News
Extending the ELS
March 3, 2025
Extending the ELS (electronic student ID) validity will take place on March 17 – 20, 2025 from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
American Studies Colloquium Series
March 6: Bending Reality to Economics
March 1, 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.