Research projects
With a diverse range of disciplines and areas of expertise, our faculty are dedicated to conducting impactful research in American Studies and related fields. We actively engage in expanding our national and international research networks and forging partnerships with renowned institutions.
Our faculty’s work is frequently published in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, presented at international conferences, and recognized through prestigious awards and grants. Our research is regularly funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the Kosciuszko Foundation, National Science Center Poland, Humanities in the European Research Area network (HERA), and many other smaller research centers and archival libraries.
Current research projects
Transformations of Heteromasculine Intimacies in Poland in the Transition Era (1987-1999)
Principal Investigator: dr Ludmiła Janion
National Science Center, SONATA
2024-2026
This project will investigate media discourses on heterosexual masculinities in the transition era in Poland. 1987–1999 is a period of profound sociocultural changes – the westernization of culture, the introduction of liberal democracy and market economy, destabilization of the class structure – which led to new norms of what it meant to be a good citizen or worker, friend or parent. Neoliberalism shaped new social rules, in which an individual was responsible for their financial success, looks, sexual life, and ultimately, their happiness. However, the impact of these changes on masculinities in Poland has not been researched yet.
A Form of Protest: Documentary Assemblages in American Poetry
Principal Investigator: dr Joanna Mąkowska
National Science Center, SONATA
2024-2027
This project explores a largely undertheorized American documentary poetics, situating it within a broader tradition of protest writing. It aims to examine and theorize literary and transmedial assemblage as an experimental form of protest, which exposes and opposes socioeconomic, environmental, and racial injustice in the United States. Drawing on the new materialist assemblage theory, the project investigates how documentary poets assemble voices of dissent to shed light on those aspects of history that were forgotten or silenced. While focusing primarily on 21st-century documentary poetry, it also examines selected works by modernist women authors, whose pioneering innovations illuminate our understanding of experimental documentary practices as integral to American protest literature and culture.
Psychedelic Culture in Poland: Practices and Discourses
Principal Investigator: dr Jędrzej Burszta
National Science Center, SONATA
2024-2026
The aim of this project is to examine the cultural and social phenomenon of the current psychedelic renaissance from the perspective of the discourses, practices and aesthetics connected with the various uses of psychedelic substances by members of contemporary Polish psychedelic communities. It will explore the social practices (ceremonies, events, festivals) and cultural meanings associated with psychedelic substances by different groups of psychedelic enthusiasts and activists in Poland, and analyze how psychedelic cultures are expressed through embodied experiences, music, and visuals. It will also map the changing status of psychedelic substances in different types of competing discourses: medical, spiritual, ecological, cultural.
Affective Poetics: Manifestos and Women’s Rhetorical Strategies 1970-2020
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Karolina Krasuska
National Science Center, PRELUDIUM BIS
2023-2027
The grant aims to fully fund a PhD project conducted by Aleksandra Julia Malinowska under Prof. Krasuska’ supervision.
Polish Digital Games Heritage 1958-2025: An Index and Bibliography
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Paweł Frelik, prof. ucz.
NPRH (National Programme for the Development of the Humanities)
2022-2027
The project will result in the creation of a public-facing online catalog of all Polish-made video games documenting their bibliographical data and critical writing about them. The 8-person team led by Prof. Paweł Frelik comprises scholars from Jagiellonian University, SWPS University, University of Tampere, and University of Wrocław as well as several early-career researchers.
Queer Theory in Transit. Reception, Translation, and Production in Polish and German Contexts
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Tomasz Basiuk, prof. ucz.
National Science Center
2023-2026
The project will be carried out in cooperation with a Humboldt University Berlin team led by Prof. Eveline Kilian and researchers from Austria and Canada. The project uses Edward Said’s concept of “travelling theory” to investigate the production, reception, and translation of queer theory in Poland and Germany, particularly in terms of the challenges of adapting US-based concepts to the local European contexts. The ASC team includes Prof. Karolina Krasuska, Dr. Ludmiła Janion, Dr. Anna Kurowicka, and Dr. Krystyna Mazur, Aleksandra Malinowska, Dr. Przemysław Górecki, Barbara Dynda.
Asexuality in American Popular Culture
Principal Investigator: dr Anna Kurowicka
National Science Center, SONATA
2021-2024
The aim of this project is to analyze the depiction of asexuality in American popular culture, specifically in TV shows, Young Adults novels, and science fiction texts. The study will explore complex articulations of asexuality and use the asexual perspective to reveal normative ideas shaping sexuality in Western cultures, with results published in a monograph and two journal articles.
Disability in Polish Culture After 1989
Principal Investigator: dr Natalia Pamuła
National Science Center, SONATA
2021-2024
The project investigates cultural discourses on disability in post-1989 Poland and examines Polish capitalism — more precisely its representations and discourses on capitalism — through the lenses of disability. It focuses on cultural sites of disability representation and reproduction such as novels, journalistic accounts, and disability life writing. It is interested in Polish postsocialist culture for what is at stake is the question if the democratic and capitalist transformation fulfilled its promise of freedom and equality for all subjects in Poland, including the disabled ones.
Digital Weather: Speculative Video Games and Climate
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Paweł Frelik, prof. ucz.
National Science Center, OPUS
2020-2023
The project will offer a comprehensive discussion of how speculative video games, both big- budget and independent, represent and confront one of the timeliest challenges of our time: climate change. If science fiction and allied genres are really tools to productively think about global problems, then visions – both overtly fictional and speculative – of the transformation of climate are invested with particular urgency. The project will thus seek to demonstrate that speculative video games can serve as both tools of critical interrogation of this issue but also as demobilizing vectors that convey a sense of complacency about it.
Past research projects
Robert Lowell’s Financial Problems and the Crisis of Modernism
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Grzegorz Kość, prof. ucz.
National Science Center, OPUS
2019-2023
The project is aimed at developing an economic psychobiography of American poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977). Such biography helps trace the economic forces facilitating the evolution of American poetic style from modernist to postmodernist.
Polish Immigrant and Second-Generation Women in the United States: Private and Intimate Lives (1890-1940)
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, prof. ucz.
National Science Center, OPUS
2019-2023
The project aims to analyze the lives of Polonia women settling in and inhabiting the United States in the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century. To this end, dr hab. Kuźma-Markowska will conduct archival research in Chicago, Minneapolis, New Britain and Hartford, CT, as well as Madison and Milwaukee.
Contemporary Religious Culture of the Descendants of the Polish 19th Century Immigrants in the South of Brazil
Principal Investigator: dr Renata-Siuda-Ambroziak
National Science Center, MINIATURA
2021
The project aims to analyze the continuities and transformations in the popular religiosity patterns, including the religious healing practice, of the old, peasant Polonia representatives settled in the south of Brazil in the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century.
Migrant Memory: Post-Soviet Jewish American Literature
Principal Investigator: dr. Karolina Krasuska
National Science Center, SONATA
2019-2022
Crip Appetites: Crip Theory and Food Studies in American Graphic Novels
Principal Investigator: dr Marta Usiekniewicz
State Fund for Rehabilitation of Disabled People (PFRON, Państwowy Fundusz Rehabilitacji Osób Niepełnosprawnych)
2019 – 2020
The research project combines crip theory and food studies to examine the postapocaliptic world depicted in the comic Chew, focusing specifically on notions of consumption, cannibalism, capitalism, and climate change.
Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Tomasz Basiuk, prof. ucz.
HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) “Uses of the Past” call, European Union
2016-2019
The research question at the heart of this project is: How might we best reconstruct and understand LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) social and sexual cultures from the decade between the advent of an international gay rights movement and the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS, and what can this knowledge contribute to understandings of queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future?
Experimental Cinema and Social Change: The Films of Barbara Hammer
Principal Investigator: dr Krystyna Mazur
National Science Center
2015-2018
Robert Lowell’s Lost Prose
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Grzegorz Kość, prof. ucz.
National Science Center
2013-2017
American Philanthropic Activities in Interwar Poland and Their Impact on the Evolution of Polish and Jewish Public Health Systems: Culture, History, Identity
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, prof. ucz.
Ministry of Science and Higher Education, National Program for the Development of Humanities
2013-2017
Explaining Economic Backwardness: Post-1945 Polish Historians on Eastern Europe
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Anna Sosnowska-Jordanovska
Ministry of Science and Higher Education, National Program for the Development of Humanities
2014-2016
New Communication and Innovative Teaching Strategy for Building and Bridging American Studies Communities in the 21st Century
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Bohdan Szklarski
US Department of State, Embassy Warsaw, Poland, PAS
2014-2015
The Dynamics of the Perceptions of the USA in Poland since 1956
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Bohdan Szklarski
US Department of State, Embassy Warsaw, Poland, PAS
2013-2015
Polish Greenpoint and New York City: Territorial Prestige and the Immigrant Labor Market 1980-2005
Principal Investigator: dr hab. Anna Sosnowska-Jordanovska
Foundation for Polish Science
2007-2010