Urszula Chowaniec

Urszula Chowaniec is a specialist in Polish Literature and language. She is an editor of the online cultural journal Women’s Writing Online (www.womenswriting.fi). She gained her PhD in literary studies at the Jagiellonian University in 2004 and is the author of In Search of Woman: On the Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka (W poszukiwaniu kobiety. O wczesnych powieściach Ireny Krzywickiej, 2007). She co-edited Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Polish and Russian Women Writers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008). She has published articles and book chapters on women’s writing, literary theory and literary and cultural history (e.g. in Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose, edited by Knut Andreas Grimstad and Ursula Phillips, Slavica Bergensia 5, 2005). She is currently working on a book as part of her research undertaken at the University of Tampere on Polish women’s writing within the perspective of body theory and the notion of nomadism. Email: U.Chowaniec@gmail.com.

Richard Reisner

Ryszard J. Reisner is a translator and researcher of Polish literature who has published on the role of the translation process in literature and has taught translation at a number of universities, including The University of Warsaw.  He has also completed bilingual publications and readings including The City of Home (an English-Polish anthology of Australian poetry with co-editor Thomas Shapcott), The Holy Order of Tourists by Ewa Lipska and The Seasons by Dariusz Pacak, English versions for the theatre, such as Stefan Mrowiński’s The World of Monodrama, as well as contributions to Six Polish Poets, edited by Jacek Dehnel, and Contemporary Writers of Poland, edited by Danuta Blaszak.  He collaborated with Father Jan Twardowski on a representative selection of his work that included his first volume of 1937. He has also translated poems by Zbigniew Herbert as well as the cycle Świat. Poema naiwne (The World) by Czesław Miłosz. As part of a multi-lingual project in Vienna, he had also completed translations of Marek Grechuta’s interpretations (and musical settings) of well-known painters Obrazy śpiewane.

David Malcolm, University of Gdańsk

David Malcolm is Professor of English Literature and Chair of the Department of Literary Studies in the English Institute at the University of Gdańsk. He is also Vice-Director of the English Institute. He is co-author (with Cheryl Alexander Malcolm) of Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1996), and author of Understanding Ian McEwan (2002), Understanding Graham Swift (2003) and Understanding John McGahern (2007, all University of South Carolina Press). He is co-editor of The British and Irish Short Story, 1945-2000, volume 319 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Thomson-Gale, 2006). The Blackwell Companion to the British and Irish Short Story, which he edited with Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, was published in autumn 2008. He has also co-edited collections of essays on Ronald Firbank, Sylvia Townsend Warner and T.H. White (Mellen 2004, 2006 and 2008). The Blackwell Handbook to the British and Irish Short Story is due for publication in February 2012. His translations of Polish and German poetry and prose have been published in Britain, the USA, Poland and Austria. He writes reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. 

David is also co-organizer of BACK 2: An International Literary Festival/Conference; the second BACK 2 festival/conference was held in Sopot, Poland, in May 2011.

Bryce Lease, University of Exeter

Bryce Lease joined the Drama Department at the University of Exeter in 2010, having lectured previously at the University of Bristol. In 2009, he completed his PhD Fantasy or Symptom? The Political in Polish Theatre at the University of Kent, where he worked with the European Theatre Research Network (ETRN). Bryce is currently completing a monograph entitled Breaking the Covenant: The New Left in Polish Theatre. His main areas of research concern the intersections between political, feminist and queer theory and contemporary European performance practice. Memberships include the Irish Society for Theatre Research (ISTR), Performance Studies international (PSi), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft, Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), and he is a founding member of the Queer Studies Working Group within the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). Recent publications have appeared in The Drama Review, The International Journal of Žižek Studies and Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance.    

Ursula Phillips

Ursula is a translator of both literary and academic works and a writer on Polish literature. Her research focuses on Polish women writers, especially of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but also contemporary. Her book on Narcyza Żmichowska Feminizm i religia was published in Poland in 2008. She was a contributor to and editor (with Knut Andreas Grimstad) of Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context (2005); (with Urszula Chowaniec and Marja Rytkönen) of Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers (2008) and (with Urszula Chowaniec, Marja Rytkönen and Kirsi Kurkijärvi) of Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing (2010). In November 2008 she organized (with Urszula Chowaniec) the seminar Poland Under Feminist Eyes—held at UCL SSEES and supported by CEELBAS and by the Polish Cultural Institute, London; the seminar resulted in the establishment of the online journal WomensWritingOnLine.

Her most recent translation is the book Humanism in Polish Culture, edited by Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa, Wiesław Pawlak and Piotr Urbański (Peter Lang, 2011) which was one of the outcomes of the major research project (2007-2011) Humanizm. Idee, nurty i paradygmaty humanistyczne w kulturze polskiej. She is currently working on translations of works by Narcyza Żmichowska, Zofia Nałkowska, Izabela Filipiak and Agnieszka Taborska.

Ursula is an Honorary Research Associate of UCL SSEES. Her association with SSEES stretches back many years—from June 1988 until July 2003 she worked in the SSEES Library as Area Specialist for the Former Soviet Union and Poland.

Mindaugas Kvietkauskas

Mindaugas Kvietkauskas (b. 1976) is a Lithuanian literary critic and translator. Since 2008 he is a director of the Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Institute, the major research institution for literature in Lithuania. Kvietkauskas was awarded Ph.D. at Vilnius University for his doctoral thesis The Multinational Literary Modernism in Vilnius 1904-1915, a comparative examination of Polish, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian and Belarusian urban texts (published in 2007). His research interests include urban literature and Jewish studies, which he pursued at the University of Oxford, Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies (2002-2003). In 2011, together with professor Viktorija Daujotytė Kvietkauskas, he published a study The Lithuanian Contexts of Czeslaw Milosz, and was one of the main organizers of the Miłosz anniversary events in Lithuania. A collection of critical essays ­The Post-Soviet Turn in Lithuanian Literature edited by Kvietkauskas will be published by Rodopi Publishers in Amsterdam this year. Kvietkauskas has translated the poetry and essays of Adam Mickiewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Abraham Sutzkever.

George Gömöri

George Gömöri was born in 1934 in Hungary. He has been living in England since 1956, first in Oxford, then in Birmingham, Cambridge and now in London. Between 1969 and 2001 he taught Polish and Hungarian at the University of Cambridge where he is Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College. He has published many books on Polish and Hungarian literature, including the essay collection Magnetic Poles (2000). His recent publications include an essay on Czeslaw Milosz in Cynthia Haven’s An Invisible Rope and a study on Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski in the July 2001 issue of the Modern Language Review. He received the medal of the Komisja Edukacji Narodowej in 1992 and is a Foreign Member of PAU (Polska Akademia Umiejetnosci) in Cracow. A book of his poetry (Dylemat królika doswiadczalnego, Katowice, 2003) was translated into Polish by Feliks Netz.

Mira Rosenthal

Mira Rosenthal is the author of the poetry collection The Local World and the translator of several books by Polish poet Tomasz Rożycki. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Commission. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Houston and will soon complete a PhD. in comparative literature from Indiana

University. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Agnieszka Mrozik

She is a researcher at the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and holds MA degrees in Polish Studies and in American Studies from the University of Warsaw. She teaches on the Institute's Postgraduate Gender Studies programme and the Faculty of Polish Studies, University of Warsaw. She has published in the following journals: Portret, Zadra, Bez Dogmatu, LiteRacja, Środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne, Media, Kultura. Komunikacja Społeczna, Przegląd, Gazeta Wyborcza, Res Publica Nowa and as well as in anthologies. She is the coordinator of Feminaria - a cycle of socio-cultural discussions organized by the Institute of Literary Research's Gender Studies programme.

Recent publications include: “Czas superwomen. Młode kobiety w nauce”, Tekstualia 2010: 4, pp. 13-24; “Gender Studies in Poland: Prospects, Limitations, Challenges”, Dialogue and Universalism 2010: 5-6, pp. 19-29; “Motherhood as a Source of Suffering: On the Contemporary Polish Discourse of Maternity”, in Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing, ed. Marja Rytkonen, Kirsi Kurkijärvi, Urszula Chowaniec and Ursula Phillips, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010, pp. 214-239; “‘Wywołać z milczenia’. Literackie coming-outy aborcyjne ostatnich lat”, in Nowe dwudziestolecie (1989-2009). Rozpoznania. Hierarchie. Perspektywy, ed. Hanna Gosk, Warsaw: Elipsa, 2010, pp. 333-352; “Bombowniczki? Pożegnania z Matką Polką w prozie kobiet po 1989 roku”, in Napisać kobietę… Dyskusje bułgarsko-polskie w latach transformacji, ed. Magda Karabełowa and Anna Nasiłowska, Sofia: Ośrodek Wydawniczy „Bojan Penew”, 2009, pp. 88-114.

Hanna Gosk

Hanna Gosk is Professor in the Department of Polish Literature of the 20th Century, Faculty of Polish Studies, Warsaw University, where she is head of the Anthropological Studies in Literature Section. Among her recent books are: Bohater swoich czasów. Postać literacka w prozie polskiej XX wieku o tematyce współczesnej, 2002; Zamiast końca historii. Rozumienie i prezentacja procesu historycznego w polskiej prozie XX i XXI wieku podejmującej tematy współczesne, 2005; and Opowieści skolonizowanego/kolonizatora. W kręgu studiów postzależnościowych nad literaturą polską XX i XXI wieku, 2010.

Duncan Jamieson (University of Exeter)

Duncan Jamieson (University of Exeter) is a founding co-editor of the refereed journal Polish Theatre Perspectives (PTP), and an associate of the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, where he has lectured on theatre and worked on various publications and research programmes since 2006. His current research project focuses on ethics and performer training in the work of Jerzy Grotowski, on which he has written in Contemporary Theatre Review (2007, 2009), and contributed a book chapter to a new collection of primary and critical texts on Grotowski in Polish (Instytut Teatralny, forthcoming 2011).   

Cynthia Haven

Cynthia L. Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Georgia Review, and The Kenyon Review. She also runs a book blog, “The Book Haven,” at http://bookhaven.stanford.edu. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz will be published in October by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations was published in 2002; Czesław Miłosz: Conversations in 2006. She was a 2007/08 Milena Jesenská Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. She is affiliate with Stanford University

Knut Andreas Grimstad

Knut Andreas Grimstad is an associate professor of Polish at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo. He has published on Russian as well as on Polish literature and culture. He is the author of Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov (2007), and the coeditor (with Ursula Phillips) of Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose (2005). At present he is working on a monograph on Witold Gombrowicz, whose plays he has also translated into Norwegian. Among Grimstad’s main interests are popular culture and Jewish-Polish relations in independent Poland from 1918 to the present day. Relevant publications include “The Rhetoric of Absence: Representing Jewishness in Post-Totalitarian Poland,” in: Contesting Europe’s Rim: Cultural Identities in Public Discourse (Bristol, 2010); “Polsko-żydowskie gry kabaretowe, czyli Juliana Tuwima próba akulturacji”, in: Polonistyka bez granic. Wiedza o literaturze i kulturze (Cracow, 2010); and “Transcending the East-West? The Jewish Part in Polish Cabaret in the Interwar-Period”, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 7 (Ruprecht, 2008).

Paul Vickers

Paul Vickers completed his BA in Polish and German at UCL (SSEES) in 2006 is now in the final year of an AHRC-funded PhD at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow. His research is on the communist-era autobiographies of peasants in the former German areas of post-war Poland submitted for memoir competitions. The study examines the relationships between ordinary people's experiences, memory, censorship and

dominant historical narratives between 1944 and 1979. Paul has also researched representations of Polish-German relations in theatre. Publications include: “‘Czuję sie niczym - czy to w Polsce kapitalistycznej czy Ludowej’: Images of the Polish Father from Women’s Communist-era Memoirs”, in Postawy rodzicielskie współczesnych ojców, Maria Kujawska and Lidia Huber (eds), (Poznań: WSNHiD, 2010), pp. 48-70. [*this article is actually about women’s experiences of illegal and legal abortions in PRL but I think I must have used a (sub)conscious self-censorship in the title]; “Staging memoirs of forced migration: Jan Klata's Polish-German theatre project ‘Transfer!’”, Polish Theatre Perspectives 2010:1; “The Staging of Family Memories in Jan Klata's ‘Transfer!’”, in Rodzina-Tożsamość-Pamięć, Maria Kujawska, Izabela Skórzyńska, Grażyna Teusz (eds)* * (Poznań: WSNHiD, 2009).

Uilleam Blacker

Uilleam Blacker is a postdoctoral research associate in Polish studies on the Memory at War project, Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge. He defended his PhD on representations of space in contemporary Ukrainian literature in 2011 at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His current research focuses on the interrelation between literature, memory and cityscapes in Eastern Europe, with a focus on the contemporary memory of vanished pre-war urban communities. Uilleam has published articles and reviews on contemporary Ukrainian and Russian literature. As part of the Memory at War project he is also working on a co-authored book on memory of the Katyn massacre. He has also translated several contemporary Ukrainian authors/

Kris Van Heuckelom

Kris Van Heuckelom is an assistant professor of Polish Language and Literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests include contemporary Polish literature, visual culture, translation studies, and Polish-Jewish relations. His most recent book is (Un)masking Bruno Schulz:  New Combinations, Further Fragmentations, Ultimate Reintegrations. (Rodopi 2009, co-edited with Dieter De Bruyn). Other books include Perspectives on Slavic Literatures (Pegasus 2005, co-edited with David Danaher) and Looking at Light Reflected by the Earth: Visuality in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz (Polish Academy of Sciences 2004, in Polish). He is currently preparing a conference and a book project on the image of Central and East European migrants in post-1989 European cinema (www.transnationalsubjects.eu).

Wioletta Grzegorzewska

Wioletta Grzegorzewska born in 1974 in Southern Poland. Her poetry volumes include Wyobraźnia kontrolowana (Częstochowa 1998), Parantele (Częstochowa 2003), Orinoko (Tychy 2008), Inne obroty (Toronto – Rzeszów 2010), and Ruchy Browna (Częstochowa 2011). Her poems have been published in the following literary journals and art-zines: Arterie, Arkusz, OFF_Press, Studium, Tygiel Kultury, Zeszyty Literackie. She won the “Tyska Zima Poetycka” competition for the publication of a volume of post-debut poetry. Her poems have been translated into English. In 2006, she left Poland and moved to the UK, where she currently resides in the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a full-time translator of Polish literature. Her published translations include fiction by Paweł Huelle (including The Last Supper, for which she won the Found in Translation Award 2008), Olga Tokarczuk and Jacek Dehnel. Her latest translations of non-fiction include reportage by Wojciech Jagielski and Jacek Hugo-Bader. She also translates poetry and books for children, most recently Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak.

Bill Johnston

Bill Johnston’s most recent translations include  Wiesław Myśliwski’s epic novel Stone upon Stone (Archipelago Books, 2010), Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla (Dalkey Archive, 2011), Magdalena Tulli’s In Red (Archipelago Books, 2011), and Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (Audible, 2011). He works in both poetry and prose, and has translated over twenty-five books from the Polish, including the work of contemporary writers such as Jerzy Pilch, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, and Tomasz Różycki. He teaches literary translation at Indiana University, where he is chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.

Catherine Grosvenor

Catherine Grosvenor studied Polish and German at Cambridge University. She works

today as a playwright and translator. Her plays include One Day All This Will Come to Nothing and Cherry Blossom for the Traverse Theatre and Gabriel for Òran Mór in Glasgow.

Translations include Our Class (Tadeusz Słobodzianek) as well as works by Pawe­ł

Demirski, Michał Walczak and Ireneusz Iredyński. She is currently working on a play about the life of Wojtek the Soldier Bear.