We are pleased to invite you to a “MEATing” with the author of “A Certain Hunger,” Chelsea G. Summers, at the ASC!

Friday, May 24, 2024
4 PM

Hosted by students participating in the Food Matters course, the MEATing will be an opportunity to discuss a work of entertaining if gory fiction described by a NYT reviewer as “One of the most uniquely fun and campily gory books in my recent memory.” If you enjoy a problematic protagonist, a satire on foodie culture, and detailed accounts of procuring and cooking human meat, then this is a session for you!

You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.

Where?

American Studies Center
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(The building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)

What?

“A Certain Hunger” has the voice of a hard-boiled detective novel as if metaphor-happy Raymond Chandler handed the reins over to the sexed-up femme fatale and really let her fly.”
The New York Times

“A Certain Hunger” explores desire, power dynamics, and obsession through the story of Dorothy Daniels, who moves through the culinary world of New York City with brilliant humor and an unabashed pursuit of pleasure. It delves into themes of sexuality, agency, and the complexities of human relationships, while offering an exceptionally entertaining narrative. With a blend of dark humor and vivid imagery, Summers invites readers to contemplate the nature of hunger—whether it be for physical pleasure, intellectual stimulation, or emotional fulfillment.

Who?

Chelsea G. Summers is a freelance writer, cultural critic, and sex worker advocate known for her insightful commentary on sex, gender, and society. She has written extensively on topics such as sexuality, feminism, literature, and politics, often through a provocative lens. She is a former academic and professor with Ph.D. training in eighteenth-century British literature. She was a columnist for the now-defunct ADULT magazine, and her work has appeared in VICE, Fusion, Hazlitt, The New Republic, Racked, and The Guardian.

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.