Third-year of study B.A. proseminars (3BA PRO) for summer term 2024–2025 (Full-time programmes)

What is this list?

This is a list of proseminars we intend to launch in the summer term (February–June) in some of our full-time B.A. programmes whose third year of study is the academic year 2024–2025. This list is intended for:

1. Students at the Faculty of English who are about to enter the second term of the third year of their full-time B.A. programme: this is your reference point before your enrolment into proseminars;
2. Candidates for our full-time programmes: this list gives you a snapshot of what proseminars were on offer for the study cycle that started two years earlier, that is in 2022.

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted by name of the teacher. The format is the following: title of the proseminar, the name of the teacher, information on which programme(s) the proseminar is for, and the description of the proseminar.

Which proseminar is for whom?

The programmes in the list and their abbrieviations are:

• English Philology (Filologia angielska) — FA
• English Linguistics: Theories, Interfaces, Technologies — ELTIT
• English Studies: Literature and Culture — ESLC

The programmes in Dutch Studies (Studia niderlandystyczne), in English-Celtic Philology (Filologia angielsko-celtycka), and in English and Chinese Studies (Filologia angielsko-chińska) are not covered by this list.

ESCL students are offered the choice of three proseminars from a list of six—these are provided in pairs: the choice of one proseminar in each pair precludes the selection of the other at the same time.

Race and Politics in America, from Emancipation to the Present

Dr Mary Ellen Curtin

Target programmes: FA and ESLC; because this course is also available for ESLC students, it appears twice on this page

After the civil war, newly-freed Black Americans became citizens and, in theory, possessed equal political rights. And yet for generations, people of African descent were excluded from formal political power and lacked meaningful political representation at a local, state, and federal level. Racial disfranchisement become the norm in the United States, and Black Americans who attempted to exercise political rights were often met with scorn and violence.

This course takes an expansive approach to exploring how Black Americans changed the nation by organizing to gain political rights and meaningful representation. It examines the long origins of 1965 Voting Rights Act, the dilemmas faced by Black politicians, and the key role of Black women as organizers and leaders. Throughout, we will explore the relationship between race and representation, as well as how nonviolent direct action, court cases, federal action, international pressure, and the everyday work of political organizing transformed politics in the South, and then the nation.

Interdisciplinary readings include memoirs, journalism, scholarship, primary documents, and oral interviews with key players. Throughout the term, students will consider why controversies regarding race, representation, and democracy continue.

Grading: Active class participation based on assigned reading, in-class presentation, take home essays.

Psychology of Language and Cognition

dr Agata Dymarska

Target programmes: FA and ELTIT

The course offers an introduction to psychological theories of cognition, with a focus on the intricate relationship between language and mental processes. Students will explore foundational concepts such as language processing, object recognition and categorisation, forming and maintaining memories. We will examine how language supports these processes and identify additional information sources that humans (and machines) rely on in order to make sense of the world and carry out mental tasks.

We will also examine situations where language alone is insufficient and investigate other sources of information that humans rely on—often referred to as embodied experiences. These experiences, rooted in physical and sensory interactions with the world, play a crucial role in complementing language for fully performing cognitive tasks. In light of recent technological developments in large language models, we will evaluate language-based performance of artificial intelligence, and discuss ways to bridge the gap between language-based artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

Additionally, students will have an opportunity to explore a selected topic from behavioural science, applying psychological insights to real-world contexts (e.g., environmental psychology, consumer behaviour, social norms, stereotypical thinking).

Bilingualism in education

prof. UAM dr hab. Anna Ewert

Target programmes: FA and ELTIT + EPICUR

This proseminar will be based on the Erasmus+ TEAM project course. The project aimed to develop materials to educate teachers and other education professionals, as well as other persons working with migrants, refugees and minority students about relevant aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism, combining different research perspectives of the partners and different social and cultural contexts of bilingualism and multilingualism across the partnership. More about the project [external link]

After a brief introduction, emphasizing the relevance of bilingualism and multilingualism research for educators, the course will be divided into four thematic modules:

• Linguistic approaches to multilingualism, including types of multilingual development, problems with the native speaker, language development in typical and atypical populations;
• Neurocognitive processes in multilingualism and language acquisition, including the multilingual mind and brain, the impact of multilingualism on the native language, acquiring L2 concepts, working memory;
• Social and cultural aspects of multilingualism, including family language policy, language shift and maintenance, integration of migrants and refugees;
• Multilingual education: including models, approaches and strategies, as well as the development of academic language.

Evaluation will be based on active participation in class discussions and project work.

This course will be simultaneously offered to international students from the EPICUR consortium.

A typological overview of global linguistic diversity

prof. UAM dr hab. Piotr Gąsiorowski

Target programmes: FA and ELTIT

The course will introduce the participants to the typological variation of the world’s languages. We shall examine variable structural properties of languages at every level of organisation (syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonological, and phonetic) and discuss the attempts to capture this variability in tems of typological classification. Special attention will be devoted to features which are rare or absent in the European linguistic area. The objective is to make the students aware of the range of cross-linguistic structural diversity, the geographical distribution of structural features, and the evolutionary pathways that lead to their emergence or disappearance. The validity and theoretical status of the notion of “linguistic universals” will also be discussed. It is important to realise that the term “universal” may be used in different senses, and that there are different approaches to formulating and testing cross-linguistic descriptive generalisations.

Medicine in popular culture and literature

dr Urszula Kizelbach

Target programmes: FA and ELTIT

Note: there is one more course by dr Kizelbach listed on this page—for ESCL

This course introduces the fascinating world of literary and philosophical texts, exploring their connections to medicine and medical discourse. The topics vary from discussing medical issues and learning about healthcare in medical TV dramas (e.g. House, M.D.) to philosophical interpretations of dreams (Sigmund Freud), explaining inner discipline and ZEN (Miyamoto Musashi), or ethics and posthumanism (Jürgen Habermas, Cyberpunk 2077). The main goals of the course are designed to empower the students and help them gain valuable insights into how healthcare and medical discourse shape popular culture and literature, develop their ability to read and analyse critical sources, teach them to recognise health-related social symptoms and understand their broader implications, and build communication and teamwork skills. The course involves 30 hours of instruction and ends with student presentations or a final test (depending on the number of participants).

Sample reading list

• Eijk, van der, Philip J. 2005. Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health and Disease. Newcastle: Newcastle upon Tyne.
• Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. London: Routledge.
• Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
• Huxley, Aldous. 2018. Brave New World. London: Random House.
• Musashi, Miyamoto. 2018. The Book of Five Rings. Tokyo: TUTTLE Publishing.

Canadian literature and the queer experience

dr Marcin Markowicz

Target programmes: FA only

What do we think about when we think about the queer experience? Is there a universally queer experience or should we speak about the multiplicity of experiences? What about the queer experience in Canada? Is Canada “A Queer Nation?” as Terry Goldie has suggested? If yes, what does it mean for Canadian literary history? What forms has queerness taken and how has it manifested itself in Canadian literature? These questions (and question marks) will guide our discussions in this seminar as we explore the indeterminacy and elasticity of queerness in the Canadian context by attending to a range of texts—short stories, poetry, novels, and essays—by Dionne Brand, Shani Mootoo, Daniel David Moses, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Joshua Whitehead, Casey Plett, Vivek Shraya, Terry Goldie, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Danny Ramadan, and Hubert N. Thomas.

This course is reading intensive, which means you will be asked to complete a reading assignment every week (short texts mostly; one novel per semester). You do not need any prior knowledge of Canadian literature.

Credit requirements: attendance (1 unexcused absence allowed), active participation in discussions, timely completion of homework assignments (2 assignments per semester apart from obligatory reading), submission of a short essay (1000 words) about a selected text.

New Ireland: Postcolonial, Global, Non-(Hetero)Normative

prof. dr hab. Liliana Sikorska

Target programmes: FA only

Ireland, customarily perceived as struggling with its colonial past and traditional religious norms, in the 21st century has emerged as a nation which is not only reckoning with its history but also redefining its future in ways that challenge hegemonic colonial and heteronormative, mostly Catholic, paradigms. This seminar explores the concept of "New Ireland," through contemporary literature in a dynamic framework that reimagines Irish identity and culture in a postcolonial, globalized, and inclusive context. The goal of the seminar is to acquaint you with the newest and diverse voices in Irish studies. Our classes will be devoted to the discussions of (short) fiction and (very short) non-fiction as well as to the examining of Ireland’s progressive policies on social issues like same-sex marriage and reproductive rights. More and more frequently young Irish writers depict non-normative identities thereby deconstructing the old-fashioned family structures and gender roles besides exposing hitherto disregarded issues, for example, of mental health. The impact of colonial legacies, surfacing in the narratives of migration will be analyzed through diasporic experiences; the postcolonial, globalized, ethnically and gender diverse society contributing to the modern-day portrait of “New Ireland.”

Signs in nature and culture

prof. UAM dr hab. Elżbieta Wąsik

Target programmes: FA and ELTIT

The seminar aims to familiarize students with basic notions of semiotics as the study of signs in human and animal communication. During our classes, we will elaborate, among others, upon:

1. Types and functions of signs as physical forms standing for objects and states of affairs,
2. Codes as systems of signs,
3. Messages as sequences of signs transmitted from the sender to receiver,
4. Meaning as the referent of a sign or concept,
5. Signification as the relation between a form of the sign and its referent,
6. Arbitrariness and motivation as semantic dimensions of the sign, and
7. Communication as the capacity of living organisms to send, receive, and process signs of specific kinds.

Juxtaposing the communicative processes of animals, limited to simple bodily signals with the communicaive processes of humans, involving complex symbolic structures, such as language, will help gather arguments for recognizing the semiotic nature-culture unity, on the one hand, and, on the other, validate the nature-culture divide as a theoretical approach that is prevalent among some cultural anthropologists.

Seminar credit requirements are attendance, active participation in class discussions, and presentation for the group of one or two articles related to the topic of the seminar.

Bibliography

• Cobley, Paul 2001. The Routledge companion to semiotics and linguistics. London and New York: Routledge.
• Kull, Kalevi, et al. 2015. A hundred introductions to semiotics, for a million students: Survey of semiotics textbooks and primers in the world. Sign Systems Studies 43(2/3), 281–346.
• Lidov, David 1996. Elements of semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Sebeok, Thomas A. 1994/ 2001. Signs: An introduction to semiotics. Second edition. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.
• Nöth, Winfried 1990. Handbook of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Analyzing accents of English

dr Jarosław Weckwerth

Target programmes: FA and ELTIT

In this proseminar, we will explore some methods of analysing phonetic and phonological variability among accents of English (in the Labovian and Wellsian traditions). A general introduction to the analysis of accent differences (applicable more generally to any comparative work in phonetics/phonology) will be followed by examples of seminal studies from the history of accent research, and more detailed presentations of selected major accents of English. We will then practice impressionistic but technical phonetic/phonological description of actual real-life speech harvested online. We may occasionally venture into adjacent topics in dialectology, such as comparative description at other levels of linguistic structure (e.g. morphology or lexicon). The course will lead to mini-projects in which students will each conduct a basic quantitative study of a selected feature (such as rhoticity, glottalization, vowel shifting, etc.) in a real-life audio sample.

Requirements

1. A very good understanding of the material of the 1BA course in Phonetics and Phonology.
2. Willingness to engage with real linguistic data using audio on the computer.
3. An ability to ingest basic technical literature.

Assessment

1. Class attendance.
2. Completion of reading assignments on Moodle.
3. Completion of the final written mini-project.

Bibliography

• Bauer, Laurie. 2002. An introduction to international varieties of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Collins, Beverley, Inger Mees and Paul Carley. 2019. Practical English phonetics and phonology. (4th edition.) London: Routledge.
• Hickey, Raymond. 2014. A dictionary of varieties of English. Oxford: Wiley.
• Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 2006. Atlas of North American English. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Wells, John. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Selected Issues of Cultural Studies of English Speaking Countries

dr Elżbieta Wilczyńska

Target programmes: FA + AMU-PIE

The course aims to familiarize students with two English-speaking countries' general cultural frameworks.  To this end, it will give a broad overview of the systems of the USA and UK in such areas as society, politics, religion, education, and media. This will be given with a comparative perspective.

The second part will have a narrower focus, which is an examination of the African American experience in the United States. Three prominent themes will be addressed throughout this part of the course:

1. History of Blacks from before the arrival of the Mayflower till the present (establishment of slavery in the New World and the slave system in the British North American colonies; The Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction; the Jim Crow era; The Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities; The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements; the BLM Movement);
2. The negative consequences of the above historical developments (racism, crime rate, and the poor current socioeconomic status of African Americans, etc.);
3. The creation of one of the most vibrant cultural traditions in music, sports, painting, and religion.

In order to complete the course, students will have to read the assigned reading materials, watch selected movies/movie fragments, participate in discussions, and pass two tests.

Reading list

Coursebooks

1. Oakland, J. 2019. British Civilization. An Introduction. Ninth Edition. Lond
2. Mauk, D. and J. Oakland. 2018. American Civilization. An Introduction, 7th Edition. London: Routledge.
3. Crowther, J. (ed.) 2006. Oxford Guide to British and American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References

1. Coleman, Hughes. 2024. The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. London: Penguin Books.
2. Halloway, Jonathan, S. 2013. Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940. Chapel Hill: North Carolina.
3. Patterson, Orlando (ed.). 2015. The Cultural Matrix. Understanding Black Youth. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
4. Sowell, Thomas. 2013. Social Justice Fallacies. Basic Books: New York.
5. Articles from British and American media (The BBC, The Free Press, The NYT, Washington Post)