Due to the bilateral agreement between University of Warsaw and University of Florida, Gainesville the American Studies Center offers 2 stipends for a 2024/2025 Fall or Spring semester at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The stipend involves a fee waiver. Other costs (travel and accommodation, J visa, health insurance) are to be covered be the student.

Applications that involve

  • a CV + a motivation statement
  • a transcript of records in English (“karta przebiegu studiów” from USOS)
  • a signed “pozwolenie na wyjazd” + RODO form, available at the BWZwebpage. Please, note that for now, you do not need to collect the Head of the Educational Unit’s signature.
  • and any other documents which you think could be useful in the recruitment process (e.g. awards, certificates).

should be submitted by e-mail to ASC Mobility Coordinator dr Ludmiła Janion by March 03, 2024.

B.A. and M.A. students may apply. The person granted the stipend will be required to provide a vaccination certificate and a bank statement in English, confirming min. 9,200 USD (or equivalent in PLN or EUR) on their bank account.

The ASC Mobility Coordinator will be happy to answer any additional questions you may have!

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.

Year 2024/2025

February 25: Immortality in Televised Media – The Negative Sides of Being a (Super?)human

February 25, 2025

Join us for the second Weird TV lecture in 2025! Immortality as a concept has existed since ancient times, but unlike then, the term nowadays is rarely connected to chasing eternal youth or extending one’s life indefinitely. The concept of immortality in contemporary popular culture, propagated often through TV shows for children and adolescents alike, is usually connected with superheroes and the supernatural in general. Portrayed mostly as invincibility or ability to sustain damage that would otherwise kill a regular human, the focus is put on the physical sides of this concept, rarely on the mental side of being immortal. Death, after all, awaits everyone in the end, it is ingrained into human culture. As a species, we are drawn as much to creating, as we are to destroying, including ourselves.

Year 2024/2025

February 18: Solidarity in Struggle – A Conversation with Sarah Schulman

February 18, 2025

We invite you to a meeting with the author of “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity,” Sarah Schulman, hosted by MA student at the ASC Julia Wajdziak. Together, we will look at the role of solidarity in contemporary activism, the challenges it faces, and the opportunities it creates for transnational alliances.