Research
I am a comparatist working on the theme of failure across media.
My research focuses on visuality, memory, and performance in modern and contemporary Polish, Italian, and U.S. American literature and film. I examine literary representations of the transformative effects of modernity through the lens of failure. I argue that if we give up the redemptive narrative tendencies that format discussions of failure today, we can discern the effects failure produces in the moment it happens: that is, how it serves to disrupt, challenge, and change our understanding of dominant cultures of success.
I am also a translator between Polish and English, working in the fields of cultural studies, history, and literary non-fiction.
CV.pdfPublications
2024 “Memories of Joy for a Futureless World: Aesthetic and Political Commitment in Jasieński and Pasolini,” Fabrica Litterarum Polono Italica no. 2 (6).
2024 Review of On Centaurs and Other Poems. By Zuzanna Ginczanka. Trans. Alex Braslavsky. Slavic Review 83, no. 1.
2022 “Patrzenie a sprawczość: Widok ludzkiego cierpienia” [Looking and agency: Regarding the Pain of Others]. In Susan Sontag, Seria Mistrzowie literatury amerykańskiej [Masters of American literature series], edited by Zuzanna Ładyga and Marek Paryż. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 2022.
2021 “Silence, Witnessing, and the Implicated Subject in Erri De Luca’s Il torto del soldato,” Italian Studies 77 no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2021.1971433.
2018 “From Accattone to ‘Profezia’: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Productive Failure.” In Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed: A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Luca Peretti and Karen Raizen, 177-193. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
2015 “Failure as an Autonomous Practice. Pasolini’s Roman Trilogy.” LaRivista: Études culturelles italiennes Sorbonne Universités, N° 4 (2015): 209-215.
2014 “Questions of Comparison.” Review of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman. Planeta Literatur, Fall 2014, 101-107.
2013 “The Walk of Shame and the Development of the Racialized Gendered Self.” In The Walk of Shame: an Anthology, edited by Mira Moshe and Nicoleta Corbu, 235-248. Hauppauge: Nova Science Publishers, 2013.
Translations
2021 Małgorzata Popiołek-Roßkamp, Annika Wienert, eds. Designing the New East: Architecture, Spatial, and Urban Planning in Poland under German Occupation, 1939-1945. (Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 70, No. 4). Three articles translated from the Polish.
2019 Krzysztof Kąkolewski, How Have You Been, Sir?. Two chapters translated from the Polish. And There Will Be Singing: An Anthology of International Writing from the Massachusetts Review, combining best writing in translation from the MR, University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Reprint.
2017 Krzysztof Kąkolewski, How Have You Been, Sir?. Two chapters translated from the Polish. Massachusetts Review 58 No. 3 (Fall 2017).
2016 Anne Lacoste, ed., Wojciech Zamecznik: Photography in All Its Forms. Translated from the Polish. Lausanne: Musée de l’Elysée, 2016.
2015 Karolina Puchała-Rojek, Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, eds. Wojciech Zamecznik – Foto-graficznie/Wojciech Zamecznik – Photo-graphics. Translated from the Polish (with Anna Micińska). Warsaw: Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii, 2015.
2015 Katarzyna Stangret, Pokój wyobraźni. Słownik Tadeusza Kantora / The Room of Imagination. A Tadeusz Kantor Dictionary. Translated from the Polish (with Anna Micińska). Warsaw: Circo Barbaro, 2015.
2015 Marta Przybyło-Ibadullajev, Sławomir Sikora, Monika Supruniuk, Emulsja. Translated from the Polish (with Anna Micińska). Warsaw: Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii, 2015.
Conference Presentations
2024 “Performance of Non-Belonging: Feminist Performance of Protest from Ewa Partum to Liliana Zeic,” Legacies of Cultural Resistance, Irish Association for Russian, Central, and East European Studies, Dublin, Ireland.
2024 “Moving Beyond Redemption: What We Need from Failure Studies,” Failure Regimes: Economization, Creolization and Moralization of Failing, University of Warsaw, Poland.
2024 “After Failure: What Remains When Utopias Fail,” Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia workshop, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
2024 “Why Polish Studies Need a Transnational Turn,” British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
2023 “Memories of Joy: Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita and Jasieński’s Bal manekinów,” Memory Studies Association. Newcastle, United Kingdom.
2023 “Utopianism beyond the Future: Polish Science-Fiction in the Early 1900s,” Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. Central Connecticut University, United States.
2023 “After Failure:Utopias of the Present in Early Twentieth-century Poland,” British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. University of Glasgow, United Kingdom.
2022 “Watching It: Restaging and Implication in Burning Barn,” American Comparative Literature Association. National University of Taiwan. (online)
2022 “Waste Witness: James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie,” European Association of American Studies. Madrid, Spain.
2021 “Citizenship in a ‘World Without Mend’: Pope.L,” European Association of American Studies. University of Warsaw, Poland.
2020 “The Narrative of Disillusionment and the Post-Socialist Critic,” American Comparative Literature Association. Panel held on-line following conference cancellation.
2020 “Slow Down to a Halt: Beholding Failure in Action,” Northeast Modern Language Association, Boston, MA.
2018 “John Williams: The Fame of a Non-Writer.” European Association of American Studies. King’s College London, University College London.
2018 “Fail Worse: Against Failure Studies,” American Comparative Literature Association. University of California, Los Angeles.
2017 “’I Wanted to Make a Dance About Ecstasy’: Folk Memory and Performed Failure in the Works of Ralph Lemon.” Polish Association for American Studies. University of Szczecin, Poland.
2017 “The Palimpsest of Representation in Krzysztof Kąkolewski’s How Have You Been, Sir?.” American Literary Translators Association. Minneapolis, MN.
2016 “Dangerous Machines and Bodily Exhaustion: Cesare Pavese's La trilogia delle macchine.” American Comparative Literature Association. Harvard University.
2015 "Remains of the Day: Body, Class and Imitation in Kazuo Ishiguro's Novel." English Graduate Organization. University of Massachusetts Amherst.
2015 “Locating Postcolonial Subjectivity: Poland, 'Europe', and Border Management.” American Comparative Literature Association. Seattle, WA.
2015 “From Accattone to ‘Profezia’: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Productive Failure.” Legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini Conference. Yale University.
2014 “Failure as an Autonomous Practice: Pasolini’s Roman Trilogy.” Pier Paolo Pasolini: Between Regression and Failure Conference. Université de la Sorbonne.