Tag Archive: events
Year 2024/2025
January 9: It’s a True Story – It Happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era
January 9, 2025
Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025! Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted. The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.
Year 2024/2025
December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not
December 18, 2024
Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.
American Studies Colloquium Series
December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland
December 19, 2024
We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.
Year 2024/2025
December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice
December 17, 2024
During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.
American Studies Colloquium Series
December 12: Technological Imaginaries and the Universal Ambitions of Silicon Valley
December 12, 2024
Drawing on her new book, Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist imaginaries and the politics of digital technologies (University of California Press), in this talk Ferrari shows how these discourses, which she calls “technological imaginaries”, shape how we experience digital technologies. She discusses how, for the past 30 years, Silicon Valley tech actors have produced and popularized a specific way of thinking about digital technologies, which has become mainstream. This dominant technological imaginary brings together technocratic aspirations and populist justifications. While arising out of the peculiarities of Silicon Valley and of the American 1990s, this dominant imaginary has posited its universality by presenting its tenets as if they were global, unbiased, and equally suitable for everyone, everywhere. She argues that to really curb the socio-political influence of Big Tech companies we also need to understand, critique, and resist the power of their technological imaginary.
American Studies Colloquium Series
December 5: Reinventing the Past to Change the Future: Alt-History and Reactionary Futurity
December 5, 2024
This presentation examines “alt-history” as a mode of reactionary worldbuilding, with a focus on how far-right influencers use alternate histories to reshape public understandings of the past and galvanize political action. Through examples like Tucker Carlson’s Patriot Purge and Dinesh D’Souza’s Death of a Nation, the talk explores how reactionary narratives blend science fictional techniques with conspiracy fantasies to legitimize authoritarian politics. The discussion includes a genealogy of the right-wing myth of “liberal fascism,” tracing its evolution and role in contemporary ideological landscapes shaped by historical revisionism and speculative worldbuilding.
Year 2024/2025
10 Grudnia: Odmieńczość: Obywatelstwo Seksualne i Archiwum – Premiera Książki
December 5, 2024
Zapraszamy na dyskusję z udziałem prof. Tomasza Basiuka, prof. Agnieszki Kościańskiej i dra Jędrzeja Burszty, redaktorów książki “Odmieńczość: obywatelstwo seksualne i archiwum”, która ukaże się nakładem Wydawnictw Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Rozmowę poprowadzi dr Ludmiła Janion.
American Studies Colloquium Series
November 28: Soviet-Born Jewish Literature between North America and Germany
November 28, 2024
In this conversation, Stuart Taberner (University of Leeds) and Karolina Krasuska (University of Warsaw) will explore some of the parallels and contrasts between the experiences of Soviet Jews who migrated to Germany and the United States in successive waves since the 1960s. Specifically, they will examine the literary production of these cohorts of Soviet Jewish migrants, relating to arrival in the destination country, the reconfiguration of Jewish identity, gender, and Holocaust memory. Following a brief introduction to the historical, sociological, and literary context in Germany and the USA, Stuart and Karolina will engage in a discussion of key points of comparisons and difference.
Year 2024/2025
November 20: ‘A Plane out of Phase’ – The Dark Continuance of the Gothic 1980s
November 20, 2024
Weird Fictions Research Group invites you to join for a fantastic (no pun intended) lecture by our guest, Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn from Manchester Metropolitan University! This lecture asks you to consider the dark return of the Gothic 1980s in contemporary culture. Drawing upon ideas and examples of sequelisation, IP branding, apparatus theory, YouTube video curation, nostalgic programming, weird TV, and music, and the confluence of such forms in streaming series including Stranger Things and the current media adoption of Dark MAGA, this lecture invites you to examine the toxicity of the rhetoric of restorative projections and to query its undervalued reflective nostalgia as imagined onscreen to reclaim the future from the precarious dark present.
Year 2024/2025
November 18: After the US Elections: The Futures of European Security and Transatlantic Cooperation
November 18, 2024
Together with Gazeta Wyborcza we are delighted to invite you to the whole-day conference “After the US Elections: The Futures of European Security and Transatlantic Cooperation” dedicated to the global and regional (CEE) impact of the results of the 2024 US presidential elections. We will try to parse through the scenarios regarding the relationship between the US and Europe, human rights and democracy worldwide, aid to Ukraine, and new global threats. The invited guests include President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, ASC professors, external policy experts, and journalists and editors from GW.
Year 2024/2025
November 21: “House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction” Author’s Meeting
November 19, 2024
Join us on November 21, 2024 for an author’s meeting with Dr. Agnieszka Kotwasińska about her book “House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction” published last year by the University of Wales Press. Dr. Kotwasińska will be joined by Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, and the event will be moderated by Dr. Jędrzej Burszta.
Year 2024/2025
November 14: Recruitment for the Student Chapter of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group
November 14, 2024
We are happy to announce that we are opening recruitment for the team coordinating the activities of the Student Chapter of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group at the ASC! This year, we would like to invite new members of the ASC community (and not only) to our team, in order to coordinate the next series of events and, above all, to make our space available to different classes of graduates at the BA and MA level.
Year 2024/2025
November 12: Mirror Mirror – The Repeated Use of Unnerving Duplicates Within Children’s Television.
November 12, 2024
Dear All, Please, join us for the online meeting in the Weird TV series! This presentation will investigate area of children-focused media where the notions of the unnerving, unease and the dark imaginary tend to be found and explore this repeating or indeed duplicating aspect of fear and replicated weirdness present within children’s televisual media.
American Studies Colloquium Series
November 14: Building a Hemispheric Empire. The United States in Latin America, 1898-1945
November 6, 2024
Join us for the opening lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! Most historians agree that the US has played an imperial role in 20 th -century Latin America. However, what kind of empire was that? Was it based on dollars or bullets? Latin American elites and public opinion were passive actors within “empire’s workshop” or were actively “cooperating with the colossus”? Focusing on the first five decades of the 20 th -century, Marco Mariano argues that Washington built a hemispheric empire whose most distinctive feature was to be found in the material and immaterial infrastructures that enabled Washington to put in place what Paul Kramer defined an “international empire”.
Year 2024/2025
October 30: Screening of “Dance, Girl, Dance”
October 30, 2024
You are cordially invited to an evening devoted to Dorothy Arzner, an amazing figure of Hollywood cinema. Arzner, one of the only two women directors of the classical era, was a trailblazing filmmaker and a queer artist who created a number of films showcasing female protagonists. By screening Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) we celebrate her work before the major retrospective of Arzner organized in Wrocław by the American Film Festival. The festival is the partner of this event and the Festival’s director Urszula Śniegowska will greet the audience before the film. After the screening, we will discuss Arzner, her cinema, and her career with ASC and AFF experts, trying to provide a cultural framework for understanding Hollywood and gender in the classical era.
Year 2024/2025
October 29: [WEIRD HALLOWEEN WORKSHOP] “The Truth Is Out There” – The X-Files and (Meta) TV Discourse
October 29, 2024
The Weird Fiction Research Group would like to invite you to a Halloween workshop! Together, we will watch and discuss an episode of the classic 90s TV show, The X-Files. We don’t want to spoil too much, but the episode chosen by dr Kotwasińska is a wonderful gateway into this year’s theme, “Weird TV”! There is much to unpack there: TV as a medium, TV as a threat, conspiracy theories, and, last but not least, the wonderful campiness of The X-Files as a series.