On 9th and 10th December, at the University of Warsaw, there will be an action called “UW congratulates Olga Tokarczuk”. Members of the UW academic community will have an opportunity to congratulate Nobel Prize laureate. The author of “The Books of Jacob” (Księgi Jakubowe) or “Flights” (Bieguni) graduated from the UW Faculty of Psychology.

On 10th December, during the Nobel Prize award ceremony at Konserthuset Stockholm, Olga Torakczuk will obtain the award. Polish writer is recognised as one of the most distinguished representatives of modern literature in Poland and the world. She holds many Polish and international awards. In 2018, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel “Flights” (Bieguni). This book also won the Nike Award, Poland’s top literary prize, in 2008. In 2015, Olga Tokarczuk received another Nike Award for the impressive historical novel “The Books of Jacob” (Księgi Jakubowe).

In 1987, Olga Tokarczuk graduated from the University of Warsaw Faculty of Psychology. She is the 15th woman to receive the literature prize and the 6th from Poland. Among the laureates are also other two graduates of UW, namely Henryk Sienkiewicz, and Czesław Miłosz.

On the occasion of Nobel prize-giving to Olga Tokarczuk by the Nobel Prize Committee, UW undertakes the action “UW congratulates Tokarczuk”. It aims to encourage students and employees of the university to express their congratulations to the outstanding writer. One can do this by taking a photo using a specially prepared photo frame. The frame refers to Tokarczuk’s works and includes a quotation of the writer’s letter to Prof. Marcin Pałys, UW rector.

Each person taking part in this activity is invited to share their photos on social media using hashtags UWcongratulatesTokarczuk and NobelPrizeLaureateisfromUW. The UW Press Office organises the action.

Photos can be taken on 9th December at 9:00-10:00 on the UW main campus near the Old Library building and the main gate. On 10th December at 11:00-13:00 in front of the University of Warsaw Library entrance.

The Swedish Academy had decided to award the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature to Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2019 went to the Austrian writer, Peter Handke.

The Nobel Prize award ceremony will be held at 16:30 in Stockholm. It will be streamed live on the Nobel Prize website nobelprize.org.

 

One can follow the action on the university profiles and social media.

https://twitter.com/UniWarszawski

https://www.facebook.com/fanpageUW

https://www.instagram.com/uniwersytetwarszawski/

 

More information:
https://www.uw.edu.pl/akcja-uw-gratuluje-oldze-tokarczuk/

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.