Special Guests
Special Guests
Rafał Borysławski, Ph.D., D.Litt., is an Associate Professor in the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, Poland, and his research focuses chiefly on Old English culture and literature as well as on the questions of medieval culture associated with the field of social history. He has published a book on the idea of enigmaticity in Old English literature and over forty papers discussing topics devoted to Old English philosophical and cultural outlooks, Middle English romances and fabliaux, and Old French literature and visual culture. He has also co-edited four volumes of scholarly papers related to medieval studies and intersections of history, historiography and philology and he has co-authored a project resulting in a book of his poetry and computer art inspired by medieval culture. A member of ISAS (International Society of Anglo-Saxonists), he has lectured at the Universities of Oslo, Reykjavik, Tarragona, Vilnius, Warsaw, and York St. John. He has co-ordinated an international exchange programme for students and scholars wishing to study in Scandinavia and Poland, and, as the supervisor of H/Story, a doctoral research group exploring interdependencies between literary and philological studies, he has co-organized several successful international conferences.
A keen skier, hiker and swimmer, he is passionate about exploring the world and seeing it anew through the eyes of his teenage son.
Anna Czarnowus is Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Silesia, Katowice. She specializes in Middle English literature and published her doctorate as Inscription on the Body: Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2009). Her Habilitatzionsschrift was published as the monograph Fantasies of the Other’s Body: Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature (Peter Lang, 2013). She has written on Chaucer and the Chaucerians, Middle English romance, medieval literature from the perspective of postcolonial and gender studies, medievalisms, and litanic poetry. Her recent interests include ecocriticism and the history of emotions. She cooperates with the Interdisciplinary Research Team at the University of Warsaw and is member of the Third Culture: Laboratory of Animal Studies at the University of Silesia.
Helena Sobol is an Assistant Professor at the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz; last year she defended her PhD at the University of Warsaw. Her research combines generative phonology (within the frameworks of Optimality Theory and Feature Geometry) with Old English philology, paleography and runology. Her recent projects concern the Old English letter wynn <ƿ> and the phonology of the relevant sound, the runes on the Franks Casket, and two Exeter Book poems – Resignation and The Riming Poem .
Medievalist, his main areas of research are: history of medieval Scandinavia, skaldic poetry and skalds, and skald sagas, Scandinavian medieval historiography. Author of numerous publications, including monographs on the legend of Jómsborg, 11th century skalds and Cnut the Great.
Andrzej Wicher is a lecturer in the history of English literature and theory of literature in the Institute of English Studies of Łódź University. His field of study is Medieval and Renaissance studies, cultural studies, and modern fantasy literature, with a special emphasis on the presence of folktale motifs in works of literature. He is the author of: Archaeology of the Sublime. Studies in Late - Medieval English Writings (Katowice 1995), and Shakespeare's Parting Wondertales - a Study of the Elements of the Tale of Magic in William Shakespeare's Late Plays (Łódź 2003), and Selected Medieval and Religious Themes in the Works of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien (forthcoming). He also translated some Middle English poems, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, into Polish.
Professor Andrzej Wicher is Head of the University of Łódź Centre for Studies in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature.
Is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in English Language at the Liverpool Hope University. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow, on the semantics of ANGER in Old English, which examined the representations of this emotion in Old English prose and poetry through a corpus-based analysis of eight word-families to understand how Anglo-Saxons represented and conceptualised ANGER and how this vocabulary operates within the broader lexicon. In Glasgow she also worked as a Research and Project Assistant, particularly on the Mapping Metaphor in the Historical Thesaurus Project, which aimed to show changes of metaphorical expression in the history of English. Put simply, she is interested in words, what they mean and how they work - hence her research into semantics, lexicology and lexicography - but also in the history of emotions and cross-cultural differences across time. In her spare time, she's been known to engage in and teach historical swordplay.
Old English Student Society KNA UJ