News
Competition for Student Research Grants
March 27, 2025
The American Studies Center is pleased to announce a competition for student research grants. The grants will support students’ work on their MA theses and BA papers. As the research must be related to a BA paper or an MA thesis, 3rd year BA students and MA students of all years will have a priority.
News
Meeting with the Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Quality of Teaching and Learning
March 21, 2025
On March 26 at 6:30 PM, we invite you to an open online meeting with the Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Quality of Teaching and Learning, Prof. Maciej Raś. During the meeting, we will discuss topics important to students and those interested in studying at the University of Warsaw.
News
ZIP 2.0 Integrated Teaching Development Program for the ASC Undergraduate Program
March 20, 2025
We would like to inform you that as of January 1, 2025, the University of Warsaw is implementing the “Integrated Teaching Development Program – ZIP 2.0,” co-financed by the European Social Fund under the European Funds for Social Development 2021–2027 (FERS) program. Its goal is to adapt the educational offer to the needs of the economy and labor market, as well as to support green and digital transformation.
Year 2024/2025
March 25: Don’t Adjust the TV: TV Heads and Television Nightmares in Horror Video Games
March 20, 2025
On the heels of a meeting about horror in children’s films we’re switching gears to video games! Join Weird Fiction Research Group for “Don’t Adjust the TV: TV Heads and Television Nightmares in Horror Video Games”. In this presentation, we will explore the evolution of TV Head monsters in gaming, arguing that their prominence reflects the medium’s deep-rooted preoccupation with film.
News
Current Issues in Publishing Studies – 2025 University of Warsaw International Summer School
March 17, 2025
We invite interested doctoral students and early career researchers working in publishing studies and book history to our inaugural summer school “Current Issues in Publishing Studies” hosted by the University of Warsaw!
American Studies Colloquium Series
April 3: Gatekeeping, Paranoid Professionalism, and Redefining Literacy: How US Librarians Fought, Found, and Loved Comic Books
March 20, 2025
We are pleased to invite you to the third lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! In this talk, we will look at how US librarians fought against comic books as though libraries were the last line of defense in a vital war. We will examine the existential threat that librarians perceived comics to pose in the mid-century and the gradual, nervous thawing of that opposition in the 1970s and 1980s.
Year 2024/2025
24 Marca: Dlaczego Amerykanie Zaufali Szarlatanom? Klub Amerykański #1: Anna Kurowicka i Elżbieta Korolczuk
March 20, 2025
Kim są uzdrawiacze ciał i na czym polega ich fenomen? Z czym wiąże się rosnąca popularność szarlatanów, uzdrowicieli i handlarzy wątpliwymi suplementami diety? Dlaczego USA wypisały się z WHO, a sekretarzem ds. zdrowia w administracji Donalda Trumpa został człowiek, który uważa, że miał w mózgu robaka? Na te inne pytania spróbujemy odpowiedzieć podczas pierwszego spotkania Klubu Amerykańskiego w Księgarni Czarnego. Okazją do dyskusji będzie wydany niedawno nakładem Wydawnictwa Czarne reportaż „Inwazja uzdrawiaczy ciał” Matthew Hongoltz-Hetlinga (przeł. Hanna Pasierska), a przewodniczkami po świecie amerykańskiej alternatywnej medycyny będą Elżbieta Korolczuk i Anna Kurowicka z Ośrodka Studiów Amerykańskich Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
American Studies Colloquium Series
March 20: Limits to/of Representation: Intersectional and Gender-Based Violence in Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River
March 20, 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 18: Horror in Kids’s Movies
March 18, 2025
Weird Fiction Research Group kindly invites you to the third Weird TV meeting in spring semester. ASC student, Julia Michalak, will introduce you into the subject of Horror in Kids’s Movies!
Year 2024/2025
March 14: SPLOT Artemis Generation Open Event: To Boldly Go Or Not: Human Futures in Space
March 14, 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 13, 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.
American Studies Colloquium Series
March 6: Bending Reality to Economics
March 6, 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.
News
Dołącz do Akademii Młodych Polskich Innowatorów i wygraj płatny staż!
January 23, 2025
Chcesz wziąć udział w stażu w amerykańskiej firmie? Masz 18–26 lat? Interesujesz się przedsiębiorczością, mediami lub sprawami publicznymi? Chcesz zdobyć wiedzę i doświadczenie od ekspertów z USA i Polski, a także pracować nad innowacyjnym projektem, który odpowie na aktualne wyzwania gospodarcze i społeczne dla Polski? Jesteś z Warszawy lub jesteś gotowy/a dojeżdżać do stolicy na warsztaty i staż? Jeżeli na powyższe pytania odpowiedź brzmi TAK!, to dołącz do programu „Pathfinders of Tomorrow: Akademia Młodych Polskich Innowatorów”, który łączy młodych liderów z praktykami, by wspólnie tworzyć nowatorskie rozwiązania.
Year 2024/2025
January 21: “Women Against the Law” – Screening and Discussion of Estado de Proibição!
January 21, 2025
Join us for our first 2025 event, “Women Against the Law” – Screening and discussion of Estado de Proibição!” The screening and discussion will be conducted by doctoral student Thany Sacnhes. Estado de Proibição shares the stories of women who break the law to care for their children and of those who have lost their children to state violence connected to drug prohibition. The film, created by Plataforma Brasileira de Política de Drogas in collaboration with Panamá Filmes and supported by the Open Society Foundations, was filmed in São Paulo, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. It aims to raise public awareness of the consequences of drug prohibition, which affect both drug users and non-users. The documentary highlights the intersections between the social and therapeutic use of drugs and examines how prohibitionist policies lead to the criminalization of communities and increased police violence.