Until 31st December, one can vote for a word or expression which, in their opinion, has great resonance for the year 2019. Słowo Roku 2019 (Word of the Year 2019) will be announced at the beginning of January by the UW linguists who organise the event.

What Polish word has attracted a great deal of interest over the last 12 months? Everyone is invited to either choose a word or expression from the list posted on the website http://sloworoku.uw.edu.pl/ or submit own proposals.

The candidates for the Word of the Year might be nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. However, organisers will not accept surnames, proper names of people, places and institutions.

The poll is organised for the 9th time. The winner of the last edition is “konstytucja” (constitution).

This year proposals include, e.g. “klimat” (climate), “nauczyciel” (teacher), and “strajk” (strike), “wybory” (elections), “nienawiść (hatered), “hulajnoga” (scooter), and “równość” (equality).

Other countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the Czech Republic also choose their word of the year. Recently, the editors of “Oxford English Dictionary” have named “climate emergency” as its 2019 Word of the Year. Collins Dictionary, for example, picked “climate strike” as its word.

UW linguists are among a panel of experts who choose the word. The panel includes: Prof. Jerzy Bartmiński (Maria Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin), Prof. Jerzy Bralczyk (the University of Warsaw), Prof. Katarzyna Kłosińska (the University of Warsaw), Prof. Ewa Kołodziejek (the University of Szczecin), Prof. Marek Łaziński (the University of Warsaw), Prof. Andrzej Markowski (the University of Warsaw), Prof. Jan Miodek (the University of Wrocław), Prof. Renata Przybylska (the Jagiellonian University, Cracow) and Prof. Halina Zgółkowa (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań).

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.