The Department specialises in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature in English, especially British and Irish, also in comparative perspective. In 2016 the Department launched a new publishing series called “Topografie (po)nowoczesności. Studia nad literaturą anglojęzyczną XX i XXI wieku” / “Topographies of (Post)modernity. Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English.” So far, ten books have been published in the series by the Jagiellonian University Press (https://wuj.pl/en/publishing-series/topographies-of-post-modernity). Members of the Department regularly organise conferences and seminars at the Institute of English Studies, e.g. “Politics and Poetics of Friendship” (2016), “Aftermath: The Fall and the Rise after the Event” (2018), “Repetition, Replication and Retelling in 21st-Century Fiction” (2018), “Ellipsis: Silence, Absence and Noncommunication in Contemporary Literature” (2019), “Academic Fiction” (2019), “House and Home in Literature and Culture” (2021), 30th Conference of the Polish Association for the Study of English “Transitions” (2022).
Main research topics:
James Joyce
Wyndham Lewis and Witkacy (comparative studies)
the Great War in literature and culture
developments in the British novel after 1945
contemporary British and Irish writers (e.g. Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, John Banville, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, A.S. Byatt, Evelyn Conlon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Colm Tóibín, etc.)
J.M. Coetzee
experimental literature (e.g. B.S. Johnson)
literature and film
theory of the novel
life writing
queer literature
new nature writing
liberature and new media
memory and identity in literature
literary representations of trauma
the neo-Victorian novel
literary representations of history
migration and postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone literatures
the current global economic crisis in literature and film
housing studies
literary and cultural responses to the #MeToo movement