PROJECTS AND EVENTS
09:30-10:00 – REGISTRATION & CONFERENCE OPENING
Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Tomasz Bilczewski
10:00-12:00 – KEYNOTE SESSION 1
CHAIR: Dorota Kołodziejczyk
OPENING KEYNOTE LECTURE: Małgorzata Sugiera (Jagiellonian University), Living Otherwise, Queering Multispecies Relations Towards Multicellular Survival
Mirja Lecke (University of Regensburg), Empathy with Trees: Literary and Iconographic Takes on Non-Anthropocentric Representation
Mateusz Borowski (Jagiellonian University), Feral Media. More-Than-Human Photographic Practices in Sustainable Darkroom
12:00-12:30 COFFEE BREAK
12:30-14:00 – SESSION 2
CHAIR: Mirja Lecke
Dorota Kołodziejczyk (University of Wrocław), Modalities of Self in the Environment of Neurodiversity
Klaudia Muca-Małek (Jagiellonian University), The Biopoetics of Disability: Body in the Creative and Emancipatory Process
Anna Róża Burzyńska, Katarzyna Jaśtal (Jagiellonian University), The Performance of the Body. From the Corpse to the Work of Art: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
14:00-15:30 – SESSION 3
CHAIR: Tomasz Bilczewski
Barbara Kaszowska-Wandor (Jagiellonian University), Between Humanity and Nature: Polish Carmelite Ascetic Thought in the Early Modern Period
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik (University of Łódź), Thou Earth, Thou! Speak: Caliban and the Stuff of Life
Marcin Wróbel (Chancellery of the Sejm, Bureau of Research; Jagiellonian University), Beyond Simple Dichotomies. A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective on the Environmental Law and the Works of Jan Gwalbert Pawlikowski
15:15-16:45 KEYNOTE SESSION 2
CHAIR: Mateusz Borowski
Julia Vaingurt (University of Illinois Chicago), Fine-Tuning lmmunity: The Case of Anton Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island
Michał Paweł Markowski (University of Illinois, Jagiellonian University), Aesthetics as Anaesthesia. On Representing Pain in Art
17:00-18:00 DINNER
18:30-20:00 BOOK DISCUSSION
CHAIR: Mateusz Chaberski
Camelot Cafe, ul. św. Tomasza 17, I floor
Thinking with Viruses, edited by Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera, Hermeneia, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2025
9:00-10:45 – SESSION 1
CHAIR: Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik
DOCUMENTARY SCREENING
Tomasz Bilczewski (Jagiellonian University), Bioaesthetics. Representations of Avifauna in Literature, Art, and Natural Sciences
Marta Tomczok (University of Silesia), More Than Land – The Embodied Experience of Displacement for Residents of Lignite Mining Regions
Karolina Górniak-Prasnal (Jagiellonian University), Life, Movement, Nature in the Poetry of Krystyna Miłobędzka and Rae Armantrout
Natalia Grażyna Zając (University of Silesia), The Biomorphic Poetry by Krystyna Miłobędzka
10:45 COFFEE BREAK – Józef Czapski Pavilion
11:15-12.15 EXHIBITION
The Kingdom of Plants and Animals, Emeryk-Hutten
Czapski Museum
12:15-13:45 SESSION 2
CHAIR: Barbara Kaszowska-Wandor
Marta Chojnacka-Kuraś (University of Warsaw), Disease and the Body in the Approach of Cognitive Semantics Exemplified by the Discursive Framing of Obesity
Beata Koper (University of Opole), Of a Tum That Didn’t Happen. Reflections on the Polish Maladic Studies
Mariola Wilczak (IBL PAN), Beata Koper (University of Opole), Marta Chojnacka-Kuraś (University of Warsaw), Encounters of Polish Studies and Medicine: A Bibliographic Collection in the Field of Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities
Zofia Dulska (University of Warsaw), The First and Last Polish
Płciownik – Stanisław Kurkiewicz as Creator of New Medical Vocabulary
13:45-15:00 – PANEL DISCUSSION
Jacques Lacan and the Purloined Letter, Anna Turczyn, (Jagiellonian University), Agata Mysona (Jagiellonian University), Maciej Kolasa (Jagiellonian University)
15:00-16:00 DINNER
16.00-17:00 EXHIBITION
Chełmoński, National Museum in Kraków (the main building)
BIO/HUMANITIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF LIFE
The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Jagiellonian University organizes this conference and seminar series in collaboration with national and international partners (Postcolonial Studies Centre, University of Wrocław; Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies, University of Illinois Chicago). It is part of the ongoing work of the bio.humanistyka research group.
Focusing on the broad and multifaceted topic of life in all its representations, the organizers invite scholars of language, literature, culture, and the arts and researchers from other disciplines, whether closely or loosely connected – to join the conversation. Based on case studies, we encourage reflection on this topic’s intellectual and conceptual potential. This series aims to provide a broad overview of current topical research, projects, and initiatives, aiming to present them to Polish and English-speaking audiences. Therefore, we are particularly interested in material rooted in the Polish and Central and East European cultural context, viewed through a comparative lens – but we also welcome broader perspectives. In addition to invited speakers and research group members, we warmly welcome contributions from scholars and cultural practitioners for whom biohumanities offer a compelling framework for thought and inquiry.
The conference-seminar meetings are scheduled for September 29-30, 2025. Please submit presentation abstracts (approximately half a page, in English or Polish, MS Word format, 1.5 line spacing, 12 pt font) to biohumanistyka@gmail.com by July 15, 2025. Presentations are planned to be 20 minutes long; the subsequent written version should be up to 15 pages. We are planning publications in English (up to 15 typed pages, including bibliography) and Polish (expanded to 20 pages). Suggested areas of interest include:
historical and contemporary cross-disciplinary perspectives on nature; cultural representations and the history of medicine and natural science; historical and contemporary perspectives on animal and plant studies; modern biohumanities and traditions of comparative research; representations of the human body in historical culture and arts; the challenges of medical humanities, health humanities, and environmental humanities; forensic studies, necrotopographies, and representations of the dead body; somatopoetics in artistic practices: from literature to performance; engaged humanities and the question of life; variants of life philosophy and their reception; biomorphism, bioart, biopolitics, and other forms of the “bio”; ecocriticism, past and present; historical representations of knowledge in culture, art, and communities; religion and the question of nature, then and now; bioforms and the aesthetics of everyday life;
The series will result in both Polish- and English-language publications. Conference fee: 500 PLN
Thinking with Viruses, edited by M. Borowski, M. Sugiera, Hermeneia, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2025.
The Covid-19 pandemic to a greater extent than the earlier epidemics of the first two decades of the 21st century directed public attention to the distinctness of infectious diseases caused by viruses, their specificity and agency. The authors of the volume Myśląc z wirusami (Thinking with Viruses) are interested in scientific, cultural and artistic discourses on epidemics with their typical representations and materializations of viruses (also computer viruses and other manifestations of virality in social life). This thematic focus is reflected in the division of the volume into two parts. The first one, Inne epidemie (Other Epidemics) features articles that situate a variety of—contemporary and historical—representations of epidemics against a broad background of ecological relations and environmental catastrophes. The articles are particularly focused on demonstrating the consequences of employing virus as a metaphor to capture the spreading of various, not necessarily biotic pathogens endangering the health of humans and non-humans within complex ecologies. The texts gathered in the second part, titled Inne wirusy (Other Viruses) argue that thinking with viruses helps to search for ways out of today’s civilizational impasse, by destabilizing arrangements of power, scientific categorizations practiced today and social divisions. For this reason the articles in this part in various contexts refer to the figure of Virus, which Elizabeth A. Povinelli in her Geontologies defines as “a figure for that which seeks to disrupt the current arrangements of Life and Nonlife”. The transdisciplinary approach to thinking with viruses offered in the volume encourages to not only question the accepted borders between living and non-living entities, but also to represent the relations between them in scientific, cultural and artistic discourses in hitherto unknown ways. In ways which make it possible to imagine such alliances and coalitions within more-than-human, natural-cultural-technological networks of exchange and influence that offer a chance for survival.
Hacking the Anthropocene: New Concepts of More-Than-Human Communities in Ecological Speculative Fabulations, edited by M. Sugiera, Hermeneia, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2025.
The collected essays respond to the issue outlined in the subtitle – more-than-human communities – emphasizing the need to question and move beyond the binary oppositions typical of modernity: nature–culture, human–nonhuman, spiritual–corporeal. In doing so, the volume enters into a vibrant dialogue with key works in global humanities, including those by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Povinelli, Isabelle Stengers, Bernard Stiegler, Marilyn Strathern, Anna Tsing, and Joanna Żylińska. It also draws on the scholarship of leading Polish humanists such as Ewa Bińczyk and Ewa Domańska. The contributors critically and comprehensively present existing theories and perspectives, while simultaneously proposing new, transdisciplinary approaches to the emerging more-than-human communities of the late Anthropocene – communities that may herald the dawn of a new epoch. Rather than closing off the topics they engage with, the authors aim to open up new perspectives.
“Hacking the Anthropocene is a flawlessly prepared monograph. The chapters are consistent in both intellectual creativity and stylistic quality. Such harmony is rare in Polish-edited volumes. For this reason, the book clearly stands out among many Polish-language works on climate change – not only as a model compendium in every respect, but as a work with the potential to become a standard academic textbook in the Polish scholarly landscape.”
From the review by Prof. Marta Tomczok (University of Silesia)
Anna Turczyn, Lacan: A Reading Project, Hermeneia, Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 2023.
This book is neither a conventional monograph on Lacanian theory nor a typical commentary on the diverse and numerous ways it was received. It also does not reproduce the often-repeated narratives of subjective alienation and the return of the Real. Instead, it tells the story of how Lacan read, while also attempting to read Lacan himself through his own reading methods. Rather than adopting the philosophical lens common to many studies of Lacan, the author provides a literary studies perspective – more specifically, meta-literary studies. What interests her is not the literary text itself, but the literary-critical discourse treated as a symptom. In this way, the transformations of psychoanalysis are shown to intersect with the shifts in major ideological systems within the humanities over the past century.
“Anna Turczyn is constantly present in her text: she doesn’t hide behind jargon, doesn’t pretend to be an impersonal writing machine, doesn’t mechanically produce content, which is a widespread plague in contemporary (post-)humanities. She is a distinct subject guiding us through the meanders of her complex relationship with Lacan, which might best be described as one of ambivalent fascination.”
From the review by Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson
“The greatest theoretical challenge for literary approaches to reading has long been overcoming – or at least reconciling – the tension between a communicative model of reading and a subjective one, in which the reader is not merely a bundle of competencies for decoding the text but a living, concrete individual who incorporates the text into their own articulation. Anna Turczyn has shown that Lacan offers literary scholars a way out of this impasse – even though her work gives little indication of this at first and, like the best thrillers, intensifies the reader’s sense that the story cannot possibly end well.”
From the review by Prof. Ryszard Koziołek
Meeting with Professor Mira Rosenthal dedicated to her latest poetry collection Territorial
Date: May 17 2023, 6PM, Massolit Books, Felicjanek 4 Street
Professor Mira Rosenthal is a Fulbright Scholar at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, where she teaches contemporary American poetry. She is based in California (Cal Poly, USA) and teaches creative writing, translation studies, and American literature. In 2022, she published her second volume of poetry (the first, The Local World, came out in 2011), titled Territorial. The book explores climate change and its irreversible effects (she is from California, a land of devastating fires and drought), as well as feminism in the context of “slow violence” (Rob Nixon, 2013). Rosenthal takes inspiration from Nixon’s concept, examining forms of invisible, prolonged violence which, due to their drawn-out impact, may initially seem at first to have no consequences for today’s communities, impoverished regions, or women and their social standing. Her poetry is restrained and subtle, creating a vivid, sometimes even “painful”, contrast with the topics she addresses. Mira Rosenthal is also a respected and award-winning translator of Polish poetry. See her website: https://mirarosenthal.com
Discussants: Anna Turczyn, PhD and Zuzanna Świątek, Faculty of Polish Studies JU
World Literature and Translation. Histories & Theories of Comparative Literature from the American School to Biohumanities, edited by Tomasz Bilczewski, Andrzej Hejmej, Ewa Rajewska, Hermeneia, Jagiellonian University Press, Kraków, 2022
This volume continues the previous one (Archives of a Discipline: Histories and Theories of Modern Comparative Literature from Herder to the American School), offering more than forty-five essays that trace the recent history of comparative literary studies. The texts – ranging from statements representative of various stages in the development of the field in the latter half of the 20th century to assessments of its current condition in the age of digital culture – are, once again, prepared for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the dynamics of linguistic and cultural exchange and the methodologies for their study.
Traumatic Modernities: From Comparative Literature to Medical Humanities
International Conference and Seminars
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
April 19 – 21, 2017
Organizers:
The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University
in collaboration with the SPeCTReSS Consortium:
Trinity College Dublin, Ruhr Universitaet Bochum, University of Zagreb, University of Tartu, Jawaharlal University in New Delhi, University of Saõ Paolo, Yale University, University of Tokyo
Trauma, a term borrowed from the language of medicine for cultural theory and the social sciences, has joined the vocabularies of many disciplines over the last two decades; they use it to describe the aftermath of devastating events that shatter the integrity of individual and community experiences. This aftermath affects various systems of representation, mechanisms for constructing knowledge, and the organization of private and public space, generally pertaining to such phenomena as: the Holocaust, genocide, slavery, colonization and decolonization, environmental catastrophes, accidents, sexual abuse, exclusion founded on gender, race, origins, domestic violence, war, ethnic and religious conflicts, political revolutions, terrorism, or forced migration.
Specific historical events have inspired scholars to pose some questions about the role of trauma in shaping individual and community memory and identity, and about its positive and negative consequences. This role involves the position of the witness, the victim, or the bystander and their ethical dimensions, the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission developed on a biological and cultural plane (post-memory, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic culture, traumatic realism), as well as places particularly marked by painful events (traumascapes, shattered spaces). In our day, the category of trauma often pertains to the subject’s experience of pain, illness, suffering, disability, dying, and their social perception – phenomena particularly examined in terms of the dynamic field of the medical humanities.
In the present conference we will be particularly interested in trauma as a category for diagnosing modernity, and one that accompanies various discourses tied to modernization processes. We are looking for new readings of the classic texts (Freud, Lacan), categories, or theories in trauma studies, as well as presentations demonstrating the applicability of the concept of trauma in projects involving various symbolic practices.
We are inviting scholars from different fields, disciplines, and sub-disciplines: doctors (including psychiatrists, palliative medicine specialists, and oncologists), neurobiologists, psychologists, lawyers, political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, religious scholars, literary scholars, visual culture researchers, scholars of film and performance, people researching memory, forensic aesthetics, pop culture, translation, and so on.
We are interested in presentations that draw from the concept of cultural trauma inspired by the work of the intellectual patrons and participants in the SpeCTReSS project: Jeffrey Ch. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Piotr Sztompka.
LECTURES AND SEMINARS
Professor Piotr Sztompka, Jagiellonian University
Four Meanings of Trauma:
Bodily, Mental, Social and Cultural
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Aula, Collegium Novum, 24 Gołębia Street
Piotr Sztompka is a professor emeritus of sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Academia Europaea (London) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston). In 2002 at the World Congress of Sociology at Brisbane (Australia) he was elected a President of the International Sociological Association (ISA), and served until 2006. In 1995 he was awarded a major international award New Europe Prize granted at Uppsala, Sweden and was also for two times a laureate of the Academic Prize of the Prime Minister of Poland. He also received Pitirim Sorokin Prize and the honorary doctor degree from The State University of the Social Sciences in Moscow, and recently a title of the doctor honoris causa from Soedertoeern University in Stockholm. He has been a frequent visiting professor at the universities in the US (17 times), Mexico, Argentina, Australia and Europe, and has been awarded a fellowship at five Institutes for Advanced Study (Stanford, Berlin, Uppsala, Wassenaar and Budapest). He has published thirty books, most of them in English, and more than two hundred academic articles. His most important books include: System and Function (1974), Sociological Dilemmas (1979), Robert Merton: An Intellectual Profile (1986) published also in Chinese, Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming (1991), The Sociology of Social Change (1993) published also in Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese, Trust: A Sociological Theory (1999), published also in Chinese and Russian, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (co-authored, 2005). The textbook Sociology: Analysis of Society, which also came out in Russian, is used in classes of sociology at all Polish universities, and became a nationwide bestseller sold in 60 000 copies. The new extended and revised edition has come out in Poland (2012). Apart from sociological theory, philosophy of the social sciences, social change, his recent academic interests include visual sociology and sociology of everyday life.
Closing Keynote Address:
Professor Moshe Szyf, McGill University, Montreal,
How Does the Social Environment “Talk” to the Genome?
Friday, April 21, 2017, 10:00 AM
Aula, Collegium Novum, 24 Gołębia Street
Moshe Szyf received his PhD from the Hebrew University and did his postdoctoral fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He joined the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeuetics in 1989 and currently holds a James McGill Professorship and GlaxoSmithKline-CIHR Chair in Pharmacology. He is the founding codirector of the Sackler Institute for Epigenetics and Psychobiology at McGill and is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Experience-based Brain and Biological Development program. Szyf has been the founder of the first “Pharma” to develop epigenetic pharmacology “Methylgene Inc.” and the first journal inepigenetics “Epigenetics”. Szyf lab has proposed two decades ago that DNA methylation is a prime therapeutic target in cancer and other diseases and has postulated and provided the first set of evidence that the “social environment” early in life can alter DNA methylation launching the emerging field of “social epigenetics”.
Keynote Seminars:
Professor Kate Brown, University of Maryland,
Traumatic Memory:
How Chernobyl Health Problems Were Forgotten as Soon as They Were Discovered
Kate Brown lives in Washington, DC and is Professor of History at UMBC. She is the author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013), which won seven book prizes, including the Dunning and Beveridge prizes from the American Historical Association for the best book in American history. Brown’s A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004) was awarded the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History. Brown’s most recent book Dispatches from Dystopia: History of Places Not Yet Forgotten was published in 2015. Brown is the recipient of many fellowships, including from the John D. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for Humanities. She is presently a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and a Carnegie Fellow. She is currently writing a history of human survival and endurance in communities circling the Chernobyl Zone.
Professor Michał Paweł Markowski, University of Illinois at Chicago/Jagiellonian University,
The Rage of Matter: Modernity as Traumatic Experience
Michał Paweł Markowski, the Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Slavic Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a permanent visiting professor at Jagiellonian University. Since 1997 he has published more than 30 volumes of books, editions and translations on literature and philosophy, and about 400 larger and smaller essays, articles, and columns. The most recent publications include: Sun, Possibility, Joy (a collection of essays on art and literature, 2010), The Universal Dissolution: Schulz, Existence, Literature (2012), The Politics of Sensibility: An Introduction to the Humanities (2013), Day on Earth: Traveling Prose (2014), which combines fiction, travel essays, and photography, and The Dribble (2015), a collection of essays on modern life and culture. He is a co-editor of two series: Hermeneia and Horizons of Modernity and sits on Editorial Boards of Teksty Drugie, and Slavic Review. He was awarded with The Kościelscy Prize for essay writing (2000) and the Kazimierz Wyka Prize for Literary Criticism (2011). In January 2015 he had an individual exhibition of photographs called Line and Land in the Dreambox Gallery in Chicago.
Professor Małgorzata Sugiera, Jagiellonian University,
Provincializing Trauma. A Case of Mr. Holmes
Małgorzata Sugiera is a full professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and Head of the Department of Performance Studies. Her main research areas are performance theories, cultural studies and queer studies. She has published ten books in Polish, most recently Other Shakespeare: New Readings of the European Canon (2009) and, together with Mateusz Borowski, In the Trap of Opposites: Ideologies of Identity(2012). Her book Nonhumans: Reports from Artificial Natures came out in December 2015. She has co-edited three books in English and German: Fictional Realities / Real Fictions. Contemporary Theatre in Search of a New Mimetic Paradigm (2007); Theater spielen und denken. Polnische Texte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2008); Worlds in Words: Storytelling in Contemporary Theatre and Playwriting (2010). She is also an active translator into Polish of German, English and French books and theatre plays. She is a member of the interdisciplinary panel of experts of the European Research Council (ERC) in Brussels, Belgium, and of the Review Panel of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST).
Professor Peter Arnds, Trinity College Dublin,
Into the Cold: On the Uses and Abuses of Water in Literature and Politics
Peter Arnds is currently Head of the German Department and the Director of Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He has held visiting positions at the University of Kabul, JNU Delhi, and the University of Adelaide. His publications include several books — on the Wilhelm Raabe and Charles Dickens (Peter Lang, 1997), „Representation, Subversion and Eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum” (Camden House 2004), 'Lycanthropy in German Literature’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); on „Translating Holocaust Literature” (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), the translation of Patrick Boltshauser’s novel 'Stromschnellen’ (’Rapids’, Dalkey Archive Press, 2014, nominated for the IMPAC, Dublin International Literary Award), and „A Rare Clear Day” (RedFox Press 2015), a collection of his poetry and water colours. Peter has also published numerous short stories and poems. His novel Searching for Alice has just been accepted by Dalkey Archive Press. Most recently he has spent several months as a Fellow to JNU, Delhi and the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide to work on prose and a project entitled 'Wolves of the World: Myth, Trauma, Literature.’ He was a writer-in-residence at the Heinrich Boell Cottage on Achill Island, County May, Ireland. He is a permanent Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the PEN Centre for German writers abroad.
Professor Paweł Dybel, PU in Krakow,
The Beautiful Tulip, the Corpse and the Sans of the Pure Cut. Derrida’s Traumatic Aesthetics
Paweł Dybel is professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology UP Cracow. Main areas of interest: modern philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology, poststructuralism), psychoanalytic theories, theory of art, history of Polish psychoanalysis. Scholar of Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, DAAD, DFG, The British Academy, The Kosciuszko Foundation, The Mellon Foundation. He authored The Interrupted Paths, Kraków 2001, The Riddle of “Second Sex”, Kraków 2006, Crumbs of Psychoanalysis. Freuds Theory between Hermeneutics and Poststructuralism, Kraków 2009, Painting with a Body. The Philosophy of Painting by Merleau-Ponty, Gdańsk 2012, Gadamers Thought on Art, Gdańsk 2014); The Faces of Hermeneutics, Krakow 2012, Dilemmas of Democracy, Krakow 2015; Psychoanalysis –the Promised Land?, Kraków 2016; Psychoanalytische Brocken. Philosophische Essays, Wuerzburg 2016. He published numerous articles in German and English (a.o. Truth in Psychoanalysis, in: Hurly-Burly. The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, Heft 2 November 2009 s. 179-185; Modernity versus Postmodernity. Various Aspects of the Problem of Periodization. In: (ed. L.Koczanowicz, D.Schauffler) Discussing Modernity. A Dialogue with Martin Jay, Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York 2013 p. 115-125; Die Psychoanalyse –ein gelobtes Land? Zur Kulturgeschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung in Polen, in: Psyche, März 2014 Stuttgart S. 216 – 247; Das Wissen vom Unsinn. Die Frage nach dem wissenschaftlichen Status der Psychoanalyse. In: (ed. H.Lang, P.Dybel, G.Pagel) Grenzen der Interpretation in Hermeneutik und Psychoanalyse, Königshausen&Neumann, Würzburg 2014 p. 29-72).
Professor Andrzej Leder, Polish Academy of Sciences,
Eichmann as a Symptom
Andrzej Leder is a cultural philosopher, a psychotherapist. A graduate of the Medical University of Warsaw, an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has collaborated with the Res Publica Nowa magazine for years. The author of the books: Przemiana mitów, czyli życie w epoce schyłku. Zbiór esejów [A Change of Myths: Life in the Age of Decadence. A Collection of Essays, 1997], Nieświadomość jako pustka [Unconsciousness as Void, 2001], Nauka Freuda w epoce Sein und Zeit [Freud’s Science in the Sein und Zeit Age, 2007], Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej [Over-dreamt Revolution. Exercise on Historical Logic, 2014]. This last book was nominated for the Nike Literary Award.
Professor Adam Lipszyc, Polish Academy of Sciences,
The Shattered Voice of Witness: Ludwik Hering and the Shoah
Adam Lipszyc is Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science. He teaches in Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and at the Franz Kafka University of Muri. He has published five books in Polish as well as a number of papers in Polish and English. In his work, he focuses mostly on traces of Jewish theology in the 20th century thought and literature, as well as on the philosophical implications of psychoanalysis. His most recent publications include a study of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language and justice (Justice on the Tip of the Tongue, 2012) and a study of Paul Celan’s poetry (The Time of the Poem, 2015). He co-edited (together with Agata Bielik-Robson) a volume of essays Judaism in Contemporary Thought. Traces and Influence (2014). He edited and co-translated into Polish two volumes of essays, one by Gershom Scholem and one by Walter Benjamin.
CONFERENCE EVENTS
Panel Discussion: Material Witnesses and Terrorscapes
In post-conflict research and remembrance a new turn takes on force and visibility: after ‘the era of the witness’ characterised by the paradigmatic role of survivors’ testimonies, a forensic approach has come into focus. While written and oral source-based historiography made extensive use of trauma theories, how does the new concept of a ‘material witness’ challenge these traditional linguistic approaches to testimony? While physical scientists tend to privilege brute matters of fact as the only true origin of reality, social scientists make language the sole condition of intelligibility. Invoking the speech acts of things is not topropose a recoding of materiality as a quasi-linguistic form that would bring it closer to the social sciences, nor is it a rhetorical displacement of materiality into a set signifying relations that would compose matter into intelligible patterns. It is rather a demand made on behalf of materials that we apprehend the expressive potential of matter to reorganise accepted points of view and customary truths.
In the discussion with Susan Schuppli we would especially like to debate the possible ways of thinking terrorscapes – post-conflict sites – as forms of material witnessing that also produce certain manifestations of trauma, what some have elsewhere called ‘geotrauma’.
Invited Guest: Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths, University of London
Susan Schuppli is an artistand researcher based in London whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. She has published widely within the context of media and politics and is author of the forthcoming book, Material Witness (MIT Press), which is also the subject of an experimental documentary. Schuppli is Senior Lecturer and Acting Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and was previously Senior Research Fellow on the Forensic Architecture project. She is a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award, 2016.
Friday, April 21, 3:00 PM, 2017, Aula Błońskiego, Grodzka 64 Street, Moderators: Sylwia Papier, Jagiellonian University, Roma Sendyka, Jagiellonian University
Exhibition: Rzeczowy Świadek/Material Witness
Friday, April 21, 2017, 8:30 PM, Spółdzielnia Ogniwo, Paulińska Street28, Kraków
Curatorial Collective, Research Center for Memory Cultures, Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków
How do items, which we recognize as witnesses, work on us? Can evidences exist without human perception? Will there ever come a time for non-human witnesses when there are no more human witnesses?
The exhibition Rzeczowy świadek presents various uses of forensic science as methods of judicial investigation in contemporary art and the humanities. The adjective forensis in Latin means „public”, and art inspired by forensics is a space of debate with the following central theme – the tension between life and death.
What was available before only to specialists and, to a certain extent, enthusiasts of crime movies, has now become integral to the work of philosophers, visual artists, and architects. Before our very eyes a new field of research is emerging in which nature and technology, archival work and law, text and image, labor and creator, historian and public prosecutor interact. In this space, the most important questions posed nowadays by the arts and humanities are raised.
The title of the exhibition refers to the newly developed status of material witnesses. Can they serve as „material evidence”, as objects which are required in the prosecutor’s hand? Or are they, with their non-emotional, substantive capacity to report on crime, full-fledged investigators?
Invited by Curatorial Collective, artists (K. Grzywnowicz, M. Kula, Ł. Surowiec, S. Schuppli, A. Tondeur) place their works in a laboratory, where they examine the mutual relations of people, objects, plants, inanimate nature and artifacts of the past. Like the creators of avant-garde art, they become experimenters. They challenge the divisions between artistic practice and research. The main motive here is the meaning of plants (evidential, intimate, private, public, memorial and historical) preserved from the time of the conflict. The interpretation of one of the most famous herbarium (D. Sajewska / R. Luxemburg) combine contemporary works of art with the flourishing of avant-garde.
The exhibition is organized by the Curatorial Collective working under the auspices of the Research Center for Memory Cultures, Jagiellonian University. Authors of the presented works include Karolina Grzywnowicz, Mateusz Kula, Róża Luxemburg / Dorota Sajewska, Susan Schuppli, Łukasz Surowiec and Anais Tondeur.
Panel Discussion: The Anthropocene as a Trauma
The heated debate about the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch that should supersede the Holocene in Earth’s history and has been discernibly marked by human presence has continued since the beginning of the new millennium, and its end is difficult to foresee today. The debate has engaged not only geologists but also experts from many fields, which resulted in creating a common ground for an interdisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary discourse wherein the well-known C. P. Snow’s concept of two radically different cultures has been undermined to an unprecedented degree. Nevertheless, the recent discussion on the Anthropocene has morphed into a discourse which is organising our perception of a world picture through a set of human-centred ideas and prescriptions. For this reason the ongoing debate is the best context to revisit the binary opposition between nature and culture in order to bring together arguments for a natureculture continuum. The more so that, as Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera argue in their recent book Sztuczne natury: Performanse technonauki I sztuki (Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Art, 2016) which provides a background of the panel discussion, we should think about at least four ‘artificial natures’, depending of the perspectives or/and medium we choose.
The aim of the panel discussion, gathering experts from different fields, is to look closely at the dominant concept of the Anthropocene (and a couple of other names and ways of conceptualising the new geological epoch that have been proposed so far) in order to see how the concept has been structured on a modernist model of trauma as a traumatic stasis inflicted on our history and the remnants of wildlife by one catastrophic singularity (techno-apocalypse). The panelists will focus not only on the ways in which the nomenclature of the Anthropocene promotes certain ideas and positions but also on the rhetoric used in scientific, environmental and popular writings, as well as in other media to describe the Anthropocene and describe its influence on our ecological predicament and possible solutions to today’s rapidly progressing devastation of nature. When revisiting the concept, they will seek an urgently needed reconceptualization of the Anthropocene to make it more operative in our complex, heterogeneous, and contingent times.
Invited Guest: Tony D. Sampson, University of East London
Tony D. Sampson is reader in digital cultures and communication at the University of East London. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and Affect and Social Media, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, due in 2018). Tony is also the organizer of the Affect and Social Media conferences, a co-founder of Club Critical Theory in Southend, Essex and Director of the EmotionUX Lab at UEL.
Wednesday, April 19, 2017, 4:30 PM, Collegium Novum, Aula, Gołębia Street 24,
Discussants: Małgorzata Sugiera, Jagiellonian University, Mateusz Borowski, Jagiellonian University, Mateusz Chaberski, Jagiellonian University, moderator
Małgorzata Sugiera, Mateusz Borowski
Sztuczne natury: Performanse technonauki i sztuki (Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Art, 2016)
The book Sztuczne natury: Performanse technonauki i sztuki (Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Art, 2016) is based on the premise that the knowledge about nature is not only situated and historical, but also performatively produced across the network of discourses ranging from sciences to arts and popular culture. Starting from this point of view the book examines the links and transitions between those domains of knowledge in four areas which have gained particular prominence in the 19th and 20th centuries. Firstly, it tackles the concepts of life and its various metaphors which came under scrutiny and underwent redefinitions in the context of the development of genetics on the one hand, and climate studies on the other hand. Secondly, it focuses on the problematic notions of body and embodiment, particularly in view of the digitally generated experiences and perceptual schemes. Thirdly, it demonstrates in how far the great project of space exploration contributed to radical reformulation of the interconnections between the idea of civilizational progress and the human conquest of nature. Finally, it examines the impact of the network culture on the fundamental notions in natural sciences, particularly through the example of digital clouds, viruses and contagions. The examples of artistic genres and practices, mostly various forms of science-fiction, are not used as typical illustrations of scientific concepts, but rather as discourses that critically contribute to the forging of historical definitions of natures of various kinds. Each chapter not only investigates the genealogies of those selected notions, but also traces how they come into being within and gain validation due to creative clashes and exchangesbetween technosciences and arts.
Generation, Transfer, Trauma
Panel Discussion & Documentary Film Screening
„One Cannot Be Naughty” (“Nie wolno się brzydko bawić”) – a documentary directed by Urszula Sochacka, produced by TVN and the Polish Institute of Film Art.
This film recounts the untold story of a Nazi camp for children and youth on Przemysłowa Street in Łódź, with a branch in Dzierżązna. Its greatest value is in the testimonies of the few surviving ex-prisoners of the camps. In telling the story, the maker and protagonist of the film and her father – a former camp prisoner – move from World War Two to the present. It shows how the experiences of the former prisoners affected the following generations. It outlines the mechanism of transgenerational transmission of trauma, which remains insufficiently described.
Thursday, April 20, 2017, Hotel Stary, Szczepanska 5 Street, 6:45 PM
Discussants: Agnieszka Dauksza (moderator, Jagiellonian University), Roma Ligocka (writer), Urszula Sochacka (film director), Ryszard Nycz (Jagiellonian University), Krzysztof Szwajca (Jagiellonian University Medical College)
Invited Guest: Roma Ligocka, writer, painter
Roma Ligocka is a painter and a writer. Her books: The Girl in the Red Coat, Tylko ja sama [Just Me Myself] and Dobre dziecko [Good Child] are bestsellers not only in Poland, but also in other European countries. For many years she worked as a costume designer and a stage designer in many European theaters, operas, as well as in film and television. She received many awards. She received many awards. She also published four volumes of articles: Znajoma z lustra [A Friend form a Mirror], Czułość i obojętność [Sensitivity and Indifference], Wszystko z miłości [Everything from Love] and Księżyc nad Taorminą [The Moon over Taormina]. Her book Róża. Obrazy i słowa [A Rose. Pictures and Words] is illustrated with her painting. Roma Ligocka comes from the Jewish family, the Abrahamers, which lived in Cracow for many generations. They survived the liquidation of the Cracow’s ghetto = hidden under the paint shop. Under an assumed name she she was hidden with her mother by a Polish family. After the war she studied painting and scene design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Her first exhibition was organized at the end of 1950s by Piotr Skrzynecki in “Piwnica pod Baranami”. Her paintings were presented in Poland, Germany, USA, England, Switzerland, and Austria. Many of her works are in museums and private collections in Poland, France, England, Israel, Denmark, Germany. In the middle of the 1960s Ligocka debuted as a playwright in Juliusz Słowacki’s Theatre in Cracow. After the play’s success she moved abroad. For many years she lived in Germany. She worked there as a costume designer and a scene designer for film, theatre and television. She came back to Cracow at the beginning of the 1990s for the Jewish Culture Festival. At the Cracow’s premiere of the Schindler’s List she recognized herself in one of the film’s heroines – the girl in the red coat. This experience and conversation with Steven Spielberg gave her an impulse to write an autobiography The Girl in the Red Coat, which gave Roma Ligocka a great renown. Translated into 22 languages the book became an international bestseller and the rights for filming were sold to the Hollywood producer. Her newest novel A Good Child ends the personal trilogy of the author. Apart from The Girl in the Red Coat the trilogy also consist of the book Just Me Myself. Books by Roma Ligocka are tales of a remarkable women, who, thanks to a great strength of character, was able to oppose to the sentences of history, find her happiness and make her life meaningful. Even though she experienced tragedy, she still is able to say: “ Life can be beautiful even for somebody who went through hell – but miracles happen. My life was one given to me, and then I gave it to myself.”
’Modelling the Holocaust: Scale Models of Crematoria and Death Camps’
Tomasz Łysak, University of Warsaw
Scale models are a staple element in museum exhibitions about the Holocaust: from the pioneering visualisations of the Crematorium II created for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Jankiel Wiernik’s eyewitness model of Treblinka to the most recent such as Gerry Judah’s model for the Imperial War Museum. These objects differ in their aesthetic strategies but share a common pedagogical approach to showcasing the process of industrialised murder. Showing either topography of a death camp or cutouts of the buildings with the figures of victims in the final moments of their lives, they serve as a 3-D testimony or a transparent representation of murder. 'Modelling the Holocaust: Scale Models of Crematoria and Death Camps’ is a photographic project documenting scale models in the following museums: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum; Ghetto Fighters House in Akko, Israel; Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; Imperial War
Museum, London; Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, DC; Museum in Treblinka and Museum in Bełżec. The photographs trace the visual inspirations for the models, namely, archive photographs or offer an interpretation of them as a movie set (as imagined by Wiernik in relation to Treblinka).
Photography Exhibition:
Paris I New York
Piotr Sztompka
Monday – Friday: 9.00 – 18.00, Collegium Maius, Jagiellonska 15 Street
This exhibition is certainly a surprise! Professor Piotr Sztompka is a distinguished scholar tied to the JU Institute of Sociology since the beginning of his career. He is a visiting professor at universities in the USA, Italy, Mexico, Australia and Belgium. His books have been translated into 7 languages, including Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese, while his academic papers have been translated into 13. However, Professor Sztompka is also a photographer and a globetrotter. His exhibition “Paris/NewYork” is open for visitors in the Collegium Maius Museum up until May 03. We wonder if the students knew of Professor Sztompka’s passion for photography.