Bożena Shallcross works in the area of 20th century Polish literature and the visual arts; her other interdisciplinary research interests include the “thing” discourse, as well as the interrelationship between questions of identity and the home.
Most recently, she published a collection of essays by various authors, entitled Polish Encounters/ Russian Identity, co-edited with David Ransel. Her current book project Props of Death: Objects in the Shadow of the Holocaust deals with the manifold, yet overlooked role of objects in that period of history. If she has free time left, her main preoccupation takes form of another manuscript project, tentatively titled The Total Object, dedicated to objects as carriers of cultural and political shifts during modernism.
Among her teaching interests are theories of vision, pictorial and literary representation of objects, single book/author courses (Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, Czesław Miłosz), the Holocaust in literature, and anything related to the (post)modernist culture.
Academic experience:
2001-present, Associate Professor, U of Chicago; 2000-2001: Associate Professor, Indiana U; 1999-2001, Director, Polish Studies Center; 1994-2000, Assistant Professor, Indiana U; 1996-1999, Associate Director, Polish Studies Center; 1993-94; 1983-87, Assistant Professor, Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Research interests:
Interrelationship between Polish poetry and the visual arts; discourse on the home and identity; theories of vision; material culture and thing discourse; Holocaust studies; contemporary Polish literature.
Courses (selected):
Construing the Other: The Verbal and Visual Representations of the Jewish Community in Polish Culture; Bodies, Things, and Objects: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry; Representing the Holocaust in Polish Culture; Introduction to Polish Literature, I-III; Words and Images: Reassessing Interdisciplinarity; The Art and Craft of Polish Essay; Postwar Polish Poetry; Reading the Arch-Text: Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz.
Distinctions:
Franke Institute Faculty Fellowship, U of C (2003-2004); Polish Government
Award of Outstanding Achievement for Promoting Polish Culture in the World (2002);
ACLS Conference Grant (1999); ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship (1998-99); Teaching
Excellence Award (1997).
Books:
Polish Encounters, Russian Identity, introduction and editing with David Ransel.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 218 pp., collection of essays
by various authors.
Framing the Polish Home: The Postwar Literary and Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 360 pp., collection of essays by various authors.
Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 215 pp.
Irena Grudzińska Gross, The Scar of Revolution. Custine, Tocqueville, and the Romantic Imagination. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1994 and 2000, 2nd edition), 225 pp.
Dom romantycznego artysty. (The House of the Romantic Artist), (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1992), annotated anthology with introduction, 315 pp.
Cień i forma. O wyobraźni plastycznej Leopolda Staffa. (Shadow and Form. On the Visual Imagination of Leopold Staff), (Szczecin: Glob, 1987), 164 pp.