Joanna Nizynska

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Barker Center 322 - 495-5808 - nizynska[at]fas.harvard.edu

Education: M.A. 1991, Institute of Classical Philology, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland; M.A. 1996, Ph.D. 2002, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles.

Interests: Post-WWII Polish literature, comparative approaches to Polish literature, literature and philosophy, hermeneutics, classical tradition in contemporary poetry, trauma and memory studies, queer theory.

Current Courses:

Fall:
• Freshman Seminar 38l (Literary Theory)
• Slavic 197 (Rebels With A Cause: Dissident Culture in Central Europe: Conference Course)

Spring:
• Slavic 174 (Romantic Word, Romantic Deed: Conference Course)
• Slavic 176 (Between Avant-Garde and Catastrophism: The Interwar Period in Polish Literature)

Selected Works:
• “Queering Białoszewski” (forthcoming 2008)
• “The Something More of ‘almost nothing’: Miron Białoszewski’s Kairotic Everyday” (forthcoming 2008).
• “Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara and Post-1989 Polish Poetry,” Slavic Review: Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, vol. 66 (2007), pp. 463–84.
• “Things Post-German: Stefan Chwin’s Death in Danzig.” Transitions Online, May 5, 2005.
• “Marsyas’ Howl: The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Apollo and Marsyas.’” Comparative Literature: Journal of the American Comparative Literature Association, vol. 53 (2001), pp. 151–70.

Projects in Progress:

Monographs
• The Kingdom of Insignificance: The Traumatic, the Quotidian, and the Queer in the Prose of Miron Białoszewski
First monograph on Białoszewski in English

Edited Volumes
• Polish-German Post/Memory: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (with Kristin Kopp, University of Missouri at Columbia)
Focuses on post-1989 reconfigurations of communal memory in literature, culture, and politics
• A History of Polish Literature: New Perspectives (with Przemysław Czapliński, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland and Tamara Trojanowska, University of Toronto, Canada)
Interdisciplinary project with collaboration of scholars from Europe, USA, and Canada.

Articles
• “Wounds of Gdańsk, Wounds of Danzig: Instrumentalizing Traumatic Narratives in Günter Grass’ Crabwalk and Stefan Chwin’s Death in Danzig”