faculty members

E-mail: marmarsz@gmail.com
Office: room 203
Phone: (+48) 71 375-2439

Mariusz Marszalski has been doing most of his research work in the field of modern American drama. His doctoral dissertation was devoted to Maxwell Anderson’s dramatic theory and practice. In his book Metaphysical Perspective in the Drama of Sam Shepard, David Rabe and David Mamet, he explores the metaphysical dimension in the dramatic work by America’s major contemporary playwrights, written in the period of postmodernism that allegedly has already tolled the death knell for metaphysics. Poetry in the English language as well as American and British speculative fiction add to the broader scope of his literary interests.

Academic degrees:

• MA in English Philology, University of Wrocław, 1982
• PhD in American Literature, University of Wrocław, 1994
• Habilitation in American Literature, University of Wrocław, 2011

Fields of interest:

• American drama of the 20th and 21st centuries
• The theory of drama
• Tragedy on the American stage
• Philosophical issues in American drama: metaphysical, epistemological and axiological
• The American Theatre of the Absurd
• American modern and postmodern drama
• American poetry
• Canadian Poetry
• Australian Poetry
• British and American speculative fiction (SF and fantasy)

Courses taught:

• American literature
• Master’s seminars in American literature
• American culture
• American history
• Modern American Drama
• The Theatre of the Absurd
• Modernist American poetry
• Science Fiction – between literature and its film adaptations
• Academic writing

Membership in scholarly associations:

• Member of the Polish Association for the Study of English (PASE)
• Member of the Polish Association for American Studies (PAAS)

Membership in editorial boards:

• Anglica Wratislaviensia – a literary journal

E-mail: genderuni@gmail.com
Office: room 214
Phone: (+48) 71 375-2439

Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak has published on the nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction, bicultural autobiography and memoirs. Her other areas of academic interest have been Native American literature, the western, anti-western fiction and films as well as travel writing about the American West. She is the author of a dissertation Women’s Visions of the American West: Representation of the Frontier Contact Zones in the Pioneer Women’s Travel Writing, 1830-1870 (2001) and co-editor with Dominika Ferens and Justyna Kociatkiewicz of Traveling Subjects: American Journeys in Space and Time (2004). Her recent research, conference papers and publications focus on contemporary American novels, film adaptations, autobiographies and memoirs which address the interconnectedness of gender, race, ethnicity and class. She is currently working on the project about representations of violence and trauma in contemporary American novels, life narratives and films. She is the recipient of 1992 Chancellor’s Award for Academic Achievement. Her scholarships include Fulbright Program in Contemporary American Literature. She also heads the Research Center for Gender Studies in Literature and Culture.

Academic degrees:

• Ph.D., 2001, University of Wroclaw

Fields of interest:

• violence, trauma and re-invention in American fiction, autobiography, memoir
• literature written by American women and American minorities (esp. Native American and African American fiction and autobiography)
• intersections of gender, race, ethnicity and class
• film adaptations and film studies
• ecocriticism
• postcolonial studies (esp. New History of the West)
• travel narratives about the American West

Courses taught:

• American literature (Modernism and Naturalism, American Literature After World War II)
• Native American and Chicano fiction, autobiography and film
• redefining American selves- engendered, multicultural, hybrid western narratives
• gender, race, class and region in American fiction and autobiography
• trauma, testimony and agency- representations of violence in contemporary American literature and film
• the American West in postmodern American fiction and film
• American culture
• theory of literature
• academic writing

E-mail: knowak@uni.wroc.pl
Office: room 214
Phone: (+48) 71 375-2439

Katarzyna Nowak specializes in American Literature. In her doctoral dissertation Traveling Subjects: Post-colonial Identities in Liminal Spaces she examined recent British and American prose written by women writers of Indian descent, using the trope of traveling to explore the construction of identity of a post-colonial subject. She is the author of Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity, and the Maternal (Peter Lang, 2007), and the co-editor of Interiors: Interiority/Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). She has published papers on postcolonial literature and theory, gender studies and opera studies. She is currently working on a study that explores the representations of California in American fiction of the mid-nineteenth century.

Academic degrees:

• Ph.D., 2005, University of Wroclaw

Fields of interest:

• American fiction, esp. California literature of the 19th century
• Opera studies
• Transatlantic fiction
• Postcolonial theory and fiction

Courses taught:

• American Literature and Culture
• Transatlantic Fantasies
• Post-war Fiction of the American South
• Postcolonial Women Writers