The University of Washington will host An Evening with Krzysztof Siwczyk on Monday, February 24, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. The event will feature a reading and conversation with the award-winning Polish poet Krzysztof Siwczyk and his translator, Professor Piotr Florczyk. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Agnieszka Jeżyk. This event offers a unique opportunity to engage with Siwczyk’s poetry and explore the nuances of literary translation. Attendees will have the chance to hear the
UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee presents the lecture “Women of the People: Serfdom, Female Agency and Film Representation in Poland after 1945” by Dr. Michal Oleszczyk. One of the 2023’s biggest box offices hits in Polish cinemas was the animated adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning 1904 novel “The Peasants.” This film offered a new and updated version of the central character of Jagna: a young woman in rural Poland of late 19th century. A
“Ashes and Diamonds”, a novel published in 1948, continues to provoke heated debates and sharp divisions. A masterpiece of Polish prose or crude propaganda? A politically motivated attempt to discredit the anti-communist underground after 1945, or a bid to portray the tragic choices faced by the generation of the Home Army? And who was the author whose life follows a strangely convoluted not atypical course: a respected Catholic writer before the war, Czesław Miłosz’s colleague
The UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee present the lecture “Textile as Text: Gender and Social Issues in Polish Textile Art” by Dr. Agata Stronciwilk. When attending the lecture, please come at 6:30 pm for the opening reception of the new generations’ Polish Poster exhibit, organized by Dr. Stronciwilk at the UW Allen Library North Lobby. The lecture starts at 7:15 pm. Sewing, embroidery, and weaving have been stereotypically considered to be women’s activities, limited to
The UW Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies presents a symposium “Energy Security in Europe: Current and Future Challenges“. The symposium has two panels; the first one deals with challenges brought by the war in Ukraine and includes a representative of Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Aleksander Olech. As the European Union as well as member states create swiftly changing policies affecting clean energy initiatives, their energy decisions show significant
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs present the webinar “Darkness Was Here Yesterday: Joseph Conrad’s View of Man and Politics” by Jaroslaw Anders. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language, though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties. He came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English
The World Affairs Council presents “Poland and the War in Ukraine” – A Conversation with the Polish Ambassador to the United States Marek Magierowski. Following Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, Poland emerged as a key player and the main logistical hub for military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In a recent interview for NPR (here), Ambassador Magierowski warned of prolonged war and stated that Poland will be a trusted ally and will help
The UW Slavic Department presents a lecture “Between Nomadism and Rootedness: Literary Topography in the Writings of Joanna Bator, Grażyna Plebanek, and Olga Tokarczuk” by Dr. Justyna Zych. One of the main common themes in the literary work of Joanna Bator, Grażyna Plebanek, and Olga Tokarczuk is travel. Their mobile protagonists – travelers, multiple migrants, cosmopolitans – traverse countries and continents, driven by freedom aspirations, existential quests, longing for adventure and Otherness, or pure escapism.
The UW Slavic Department presents a lecture “The Anxious Mind: (Re)Defining Polishness in the 21st Century” by Dr. Krzysztof Borowski. This talk will examine what contemporary regionalist discourse reveals about the Polish national imagination in the early 21st century by tracing examples of divergent narratives across language, literature, and culture. Dr. Borowski will show how these ideas actively challenge deeply rooted visions of culture, identity, and nation, forcing a (re)examination of what it means to
The UW Slavic Department presents a lecture “Revolutionary Subjecthood of the Interwar Poetry in Poland: Traumatized Selves and Heterogeneous Subjectivities in Tytus Czyżewski’s Writing” by Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk. This talk focuses on the influence that World War I had on the notion of subjecthood of one of the most important Polish avant-garde groups, the futurists. Even today contemporary criticism more frequently presents the first works of authors such as Bruno Jasieński, Jerzy Jankowski, and Tytus
The UW Slavic Department presents a lecture “Third Cinema in the Second World: Images of Anti-colonialism in the Polish People’s Republic” by Dr. Marla Zubel. This talk locates key elements of the politics and aesthetics of Latin American Third Cinema in anti-colonial reportage films made in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. The point is not to posit an alternative origin of a form of militant cinema first conceptualized by Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs presents the webinar “Józef Piłsudski – the Founding Father of Modern Poland” by Joshua Zimmerman. Zimmerman is the author of a new Piłsudski biography of the same title. In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. From the age of sixteen, he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795. Ahead of World War I, he created a
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs and the Polish Program at the CUNY Hunter College present the webinar Transformation of Mr. Cogito: Debating Zbigniew Herbert Poetic Legacy by Jaroslaw Anders. A discussion moderated by Małgorzata Pospiech, Ph. D., will follow the lecture. Zbigniew Herbert was of the most recognizable poetic voices of the postwar East-Central Europe. He was hailed for his intellectual and moral clarity, his erudite cultural references, his stoic poise in the face of
The University of Washington Polish Studies Endowment Committee presents the lecture Witchers, Strigas, and the Man on the Moon – Polish Legends in Contemporary Popular Culture by Dawid Junke, PhD. Slavic mythology has recently enjoyed unprecedented levels of global popularity, thanks to the very successful computer video game and the Netflix series called The Witcher; both have been based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s book cycle under the same title. The game produced by now world-famous CD
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs present the webinar Poland-Ukraine, From conflict and rivalry to neighborliness by Prof. Norman Davies and Prof. Frank Sysyn. The lecture is part of the Studying Poland Today – talk series presented jointly by the Kosciuszko Foundation and the Project on Poland Past and Present (PPPP). The purpose of the series is, in general, to raise the level of expert knowledge about Poland in foreign countries and, in particular, to strengthen Polish Studies in the universities
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs and the Polish Program at the CUNY Hunter College present the webinar Witold Gombrowicz: The Drama of Form by Jaroslaw Anders. Witold Gombrowicz, an ironist, and intellectual provocateur is one of the most important figures in Polish literary modernism and, according to some, a precursor of what came to be known as postmodernism. Elusive, protean, and full of contradictions in his work as well as in his life, he is
Polish American Chamber of Commerce Pacific NW invites you to a presentation explaining mysteries of today’s hectic market in the Seattle area. New to Seattle? Tired of renting and throwing money away month after month? Great job and good income but unable to win the bidding wars? How can you compete? Mirka Nakovski, a real estate broker with Windermere, and Christopher Babcock, loan officer with Caliber Mortgage, get together to talk about the challenges facing
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs and the Jagiellonian Law Society present the lecture Lemkos and Ukrainians by Prof. Jan Pisuliński. This lecture is part of the series Ethnic Minorities in Polish Lands. The lecture focuses on Lemkos (Łemkowie), a minority group in south-eastern Poland and also in the neighboring Slovakia, and also on Polish-Ukrainian relations. Professor dr. hab. Jan Pisuliński is a Polish historian and currently an assistant professor at the University of Rzeszow, Poland.
UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee presents the lecture “A Singular Spirit: Józef Czapski, His Art and Life” by Eric Karpeles. Czapski (1896-1993) was a painter, a writer and a Polish military officer who in vain searched for Polish officers infamously massacred at Katyn during the WWII. He also wrote about his experience in the Gulag system and after the WWII, he became a co-founder of the Literature Institute in Paris, the publisher of Kultura. Czapski
The Kosciuszko Foundation Online Programs present the lecture The Crisis of Democracy in Interwar Poland, The Obstacles to the Establishment of a Democratic and Pluralistic Polish State, focusing on the political system in Poland between the WWI and the WWII, by Prof. Antony Polonsky. The First World War was widely seen as a victory for democracy over autocracy. Yet almost none of the new states which emerged in East-Central Europe after 1918 were able successfully