Prof. Paweł Frelik has received the Innovative Research Award given annually by the Science Fiction Research Association (USA) for the year’s best critical article in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Prof. Frelik’s “Power Games: Towards the Rhetoric of Energy in Speculative Video Games” appeared in Er(r)go: Theory-Literature-Culture 44 and marks the first time the award has gone to an article published in a non-Anglo-American journal.

The Innovative Research Award, previously known as the Pioneer Award, has been presented since 1990 and its previous winners include Veronica Hollinger, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Roger Luckhurst, Wendy Pearson, Carl Freedman, De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Andrew Butler, Lisa Yaszek, Sherryl Vint, John Rieder, David Higgins, Lysa Rivera, Jaak Tomberg, Graeme MacDonald, and Amy Butt, a veritable who-is-who of science fiction studies.

The article is available in OpenAccess and can be read here.

Year 2024/2025

November 21: “House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction” Author’s Meeting

November 19, 2024

Join us on November 21, 2024 for an author’s meeting with Dr. Agnieszka Kotwasińska about her book “House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction” published last year by the University of Wales Press. Dr. Kotwasińska will be joined by Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, and the event will be moderated by Dr. Jędrzej Burszta.

Year 2024/2025

November 20: ‘A Plane out of Phase’ – The Dark Continuance of the Gothic 1980s

November 19, 2024

Weird Fictions Research Group invites you to join for a fantastic (no pun intended) lecture by our guest, Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn from Manchester Metropolitan University! This lecture asks you to consider the dark return of the Gothic 1980s in contemporary culture. Drawing upon ideas and examples of sequelisation, IP branding, apparatus theory, YouTube video curation, nostalgic programming, weird TV, and music, and the confluence of such forms in streaming series including Stranger Things and the current media adoption of Dark MAGA, this lecture invites you to examine the toxicity of the rhetoric of restorative projections and to query its undervalued reflective nostalgia as imagined onscreen to reclaim the future from the precarious dark present.

Year 2024/2025

November 18: After the US Elections: The Futures of European Security and Transatlantic Cooperation

November 18, 2024

Together with Gazeta Wyborcza we are delighted to invite you to the whole-day conference “After the US Elections: The Futures of European Security and Transatlantic Cooperation” dedicated to the global and regional (CEE) impact of the results of the 2024 US presidential elections. We will try to parse through the scenarios regarding the relationship between the US and Europe, human rights and democracy worldwide, aid to Ukraine, and new global threats. The invited guests include President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, ASC professors, external policy experts, and journalists and editors from GW.

Year 2024/2025

November 14: Recruitment for the Student Chapter of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group

November 14, 2024

We are happy to announce that we are opening recruitment for the team coordinating the activities of the Student Chapter of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group at the ASC! This year, we would like to invite new members of the ASC community (and not only) to our team, in order to coordinate the next series of events and, above all, to make our space available to different classes of graduates at the BA and MA level.

News

The Office for Student Affairs will be closed on November 14.

November 13, 2024

We would like to kindly inform you that the Office for Student Affairs will, exceptionally, be closed on November 14. We apologize for the inconvenience.