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/