The ASC’s Gender/Sexuality Research Group is proud to share our very first and very own podcast! “Oswoić gender,” hosted by Dr. Anna Kurowicka and Dr. Marta Usiekniewicz, aims to present research in gender and sexuality studies done at our center.

In the eight-episode series we cover topics ranging from the mobilization of anti-gender movements, studies of girlhood and bisexuality, gender contexts of the 1990s transformation and disability, sexual non-normativity in Polish People’s Republic, studies of queer film and Polish women immigrants in the United States, the political dimension of horror, all the way to post-Soviet Jewish literature in the US.

Find us in your favorite podcast app and subscribe to our podcast!

Each new episode will be released on Wednesday, announced on the ASC’s social media, and available on platforms including Spotify, Anchor.fm, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Google Podcasts. Episodes will be also published on the Gender/Sexuality Research Group’s dedicated website, which will be launched soon.

The aim of this Polish language podcast is to acquaint listeners with the diversity of research conducted within gender and sexuality studies. In each episode we show how the issues of gender and sexuality are manifested in cultural and social life. We also promise a good dose of humor and recommendations, because what would a popular science podcast be without homework?

This season will feature a slew of informative and entertaining conversations with Tomasz Basiuk, Jędrzej Burszta, Agnieszka Graff, Ludmiła Janion, Aleksandra Kamińska, Elżbieta Korolczuk, Agnieszka Kotwasińska, Karolina Krasuska, Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, Krystyna Mazur, Natalia Pamuła, and Agnieszka Ziemińska.

List of episodes

The podcast is a part of Dr Karolina Krasuska’s project within “Promotion of scientific research in the public domain – 2nd edition” program under the Excellence Initiative Research University (IDUB) at the University of Warsaw and from the ASC UW.

Julia Machnowska was responsible for the sound production and editing, while Magdalena Sowul, aka Panilas, author of the podcast “Słyszane”, provided the studio space and music.

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 16: Painting in Total Darkness: Blindness as the Medium for Vision

January 4, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the last lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! Touching on various processes, materials, histories, and methodologies of making, Stephen Proski’s lecture will show how blindness can function as a unique lens of perception, particularly as it relates to the expanded field of painting.

Year 2024/2025

January 9: It’s a True Story – It Happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era

December 31, 2024

Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025! Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted. The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 19, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 18, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 17, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.