Third-year of study B.A. proseminars (3BA PROSEM) for winter term 2025–2026 (Full-time programmes)

What is this list?

This is a list of proseminars we intend to launch in the winter term (October–February) in some of our full-time B.A. programmes whose third year of study is the academic year 2025–2026. This list is intended for:

  1. Students at the Faculty of English who are about to enter 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 2023.

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 English-Celtic Philology (Filologia angielsko-celtycka), English and Chinese Studies (Filologia angielsko-chińska), and Dutch Studies (Studia niderlandystyczne) 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.

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted first by the target programmes (FA and ELTIT precede ESCL), then by name of the teacher (for FA and ELTIT) or by seminar pairs (for ESLC). The format of each entry is the following: title of the proseminar, the name of the teacher, and the description of the proseminar.

Proseminars for FA and ELTIT

Creative Writing in Practice

mgr John Casale

Travel through the imaginative corridors of the mind and summon your creative writing skills. This course aims to provide an introductory skillset for creative writing, enabling students to transform ideas into texts. By exploring and analyzing basic forms and genres of creative writing and adopting various styles, students learn how to construct events and characters within story arcs, develop alternate points of view, experiment with narrative linearity, and imbue themes into creative works. Mini-texts, epistolary memoirs, short stories, unique adaptations – whichever path you chance upon and choose, the journey to conjuring up new worlds is at your fingertips.

Primary References

  • Bludau, Michael, and D. H. Lawrence, editors. D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Loved Islands: Understanding Story Telling. Lehrerausg. 1. Aufl, Lensing, 1982.
  • Booker, Christopher. 2004. The seven basic plots: why we tell stories. London; New York: Continuum.
  • Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. (0 edition.) Routledge.
  • Field, Syd. 2005. Screenplay: the foundations of screenwriting. (Rev. ed.) New York, N.Y: Delta Trade Paperbacks.
  • Maley, Alan. 1994. Short and sweet. Vol 1. London: Penguin English.
  • Trottier, David. 2014. The screenwriter’s bible: a complete guide to writing, formatting, and selling your script. (6th Edition.) Los Angeles: Silman-James Press.

Comparative syntax is the key

prof. UAM dr hab. Piotr Cegłowski

At first glance, human languages seem fairly diverse in terms of their structural characteristics. For example, some appear to have overt subjects as the only option, while others occasionally allow null subjects, and still others appear to be totally liberal in this respect. Yet, when approached from a certain perspective, the three (actually, more) types turn out to share a good deal of mutual properties that provide fertile ground for comparison. This, in turn, yields a more comprehensive picture of the phenomenon and allows to assume that they are actually “cut from the same cloth” (with the actual differences coded in terms of parametric variants).

In the course of our meetings we will pursue this assumption and look at the selected linguistic phenomena (subjects, negation, Topic – Focus asymmetries, etc.) from a cross-linguistic perspective. The discussion will be couched within the current minimalist model of syntactic theory.

Bibliography

  • Alexiadou, A., L. Haegeman and M. Starvou. 2007. Noun Phrase in the Generative Perspective. New York: Mouton de Gruyer.
  • Hornstein, N., J. Nunes, K. Grohmann. 2005. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge: CUP.
  • Larson, R., V. Déprez and H. Yamakido. The Evolution of Human Language. Biolinguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: CUP.
  • Luraghi, S. and C. Parodi (eds). 2013. The Bloomsbury Companion to syntax.London: Bloomsbury.
  • Isac, D. and C. Reiss. 2008. I-Language. An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science.

Bilingualism in education

prof. UAM dr hab. Anna Ewert

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, completion of mini-projects and a final quiz.

The course is simultaneously offered to students from the EPICUR Alliance [external link] who will participate online.

Introduction to Information Architecture

mgr Mirela Jaśkowiec

Information Architecture (IA) is a practice of classifying, structuring and organising digital information into systems that make them understandable and usable for people. Its main goal is to improve the process of accessing and making use of vast amounts of information available online. IA guides users through websites, apps, social media platforms, and any other digital resources. Its principles are broadly used by specialists working in areas of content management, SEO writing, UX design, information accessibility, apps' and computer programs' translation.

The seminar will introduce the key principles and methods used in IA and demonstrate how they can be adapted to today's rapidly changing online environments. Although IA mostly focuses on providing effective frames and guidelines, we will also be discussing broader issues related to communication technologies – such as their impact on users' psychology and cognition, linguistic and cultural mediation strategies of online communities, social behaviours and power dynamics. No prior knowledge is required to attend.

From Walden to Synthetic Wilderness – Approaching Nature in American Literature

dr Katarzyna Macedulska

This seminar explores the evolving relationship between literature and the natural world, from 19th-century reflections on wilderness to contemporary visions of synthetic landscapes. We will examine how American writers have used literature to interrogate, challenge, and reimagine the human-nature binary, and how environmental concerns are recognized, exposed, and acted upon through narrative, poetic, and reflective forms.

Engaging with different literary genres across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry we will analyze literary portrayals of today’s overlapping ecological issues such as: industrialization, technological advancement, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and environmental injustice. We investigate how writers have contextualized and represented these multiplying challenges over the last 150 years and what responses and solutions emerge from their texts. Both the illustrated crises and proposed remedies invite critical reflection on literature’s role in creating awareness, shaping cultural attitudes, as well as envisioning and fostering sustainability and ecological recovery.

We will consider an array of diverse literary voices including: Henry David Thoreau, Mary Austin, Ernest Hemingway, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Barry Lopez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Diane Cook, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Powers, and Lauren Groff. Credits will be awarded based on students’ attendance, active participation, and completion of short assignments.

Bibliography

  • Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and
  • Literary Imagination. Blackwell Publishing.
  • LeMenager, Stephanie, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (eds.). 2011. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century. Routledge.
  • Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More than Human
  • Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Solnit, Rebecca and Thelma Young Lutunatabua (eds.). Not Too Late: Changing the Climate
  • Story from Despair to Possibility. Haymarket Books, 2023.

Gender and language in the professional workplace

prof. UAM dr hab. Joanna Pawelczyk

Gender shapes our lives and influences our behavior, including the way we use language and conduct our conversations, but few of us are aware of it. Gender is also built into how organizations function.

The aim of this seminar is to examine the relevance of gender as a social construct in the context of workplace communication and interactions. Gender will be approached from the sociolinguistic and (widely defined) discourse analytic perspectives. In this seminar we will look at how symbolic femininity and masculinity are reflected in language use and how they contribute to constructing professional identities. We will discuss how contemporary leadership has changed to include language practices symbolically linked to femininity and why. Other focuses include: gender ideologies, gender microaggressions in professional communication, gender violence.

Grading

  • active class participation based on assigned reading, homework assignments, in-class presentation.

Selected bibliography

  • Caldas-Coulthard Carmen Rosa (ed.). 2020. Innovations and challenges. Women, language and sexism. London: Routledge.
  • Cameron, Deborah. 2007. The myth of Mars and Venus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Mullany, Louise and Schnurr, Stephanie (eds.). 2023. Globalisation, geopolitics, and gender in professional communication. London: Routledge.

Fake news and representations in Historical news discourse

prof. UAM dr hab. Matylda Włodarczyk

The proseminar focuses on discourse structures and language devices used in the processes of opinion making (e.g. presentation of fake news) that characterise both historical and contemporary media. This involves issues of reliability of contents and representations created by periodical press from the 18th century onwards. The course introduces (socio)pragmatic approaches to historical news discourse, focusing on social identities, gender, culture, distribution of power, marginalised groups, aspects of multimodality, etc. Specific genres of news to be covered include, among others, classified and commercial advertising, letters to the editor, crime reports. A transnational perspective on news circulation is adopted allowing for comparisons across Polish and English historical news.

Students will be responsible for the reading assigned for a given class and will be evaluated on the basis of oral and online written assignments. Following the introductory part of the course, the students will be asked to prepare individual (or group) presentations on a selected topic.

Proseminars for ESLC — pair 1

British art and Visual Culture

dr hab. Dominika Buchowska-Greaves

The seminar explores selected aspects of art and visual culture in Britain. We will study the practices of painting, sculpture and architecture as well as cultural tendencies across different chronological periods. Emphasis will be put on individual artworks, artists and their styles, as well as general cultural trends of the time. Students will be encouraged to analyse and interpret pieces of art finding analogies between different works and influences among artists. We will start with ancient art and culture of the Celts, Romans and Anglo-Saxons, through the Norman period, the Tudor miniature painting and palace architecture, the moralizing art of William Hogarth, sporting images of horses by George Stubbs, mysterious portraits by Thomas Gainsborough. We will also study British landscape painting which gained new perspectives thanks to John Constable and JMW Turner; the pre-Romantic works by William Blake will pave the way to the art of the Pre-Raphaelites; early twentieth-century cultural revolution in Britain will sum up our encounters with visual culture on the British Isles.

Migrations. Studying peoples’ movement to the UK and the USA

dr hab. Dominika Buchowska-Greaves

We live in a world of migrations in every direction. People are forced to flee their homes and look for new opportunities for a variety of reasons. This proseminar will explore different waves of immigration to the UK and the USA across centuries, and provide you with the contexts and motivations behind migrations. We will cover different categories of migrants, including war refugees, political immigrants, religious pilgrims, economic migrants, expatriates, and adventure seekers, to name a few. We will study the circuits that shape and characterise migration and movement in the context of colonisation and growth of empires. How does it impact the notions of national, international and transnational identities? To better understand the history of migration to the UK and the US we will study migration theory which will enable us to look into migration on a broader level. We will also discuss different themes connected to the immigration experience, such as identity, work force, education and institutions. The proseminar will encourage students to prepare projects on the topic of migrations.

Proseminars for ESLC — pair 2

Revisiting Shakespeare and his contemporaries in light of politically engaged theory and activist-oriented work for social justice

prof. UAM dr hab. Katarzyna Burzyńska

Feminist – Queer – Shakespeare – these terms do not seem to go together yet Renaissance theatre gives us plenty of opportunities to seek non-normative identities in an otherwise politically stifling cultural context. William Shakespeare wrote his plays in the reign of two charismatic monarchs Elizabeth I, a woman, and James I, a gay man. Despite this, Elizabethan and Jacobean era was, by modern standards, a very politically conservative reality. Yet, in this patriarchal world, early modern playwrights like Lyly, Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Webster created powerful images of forceful agency, political defiance, and gender variance that challenged accepted norms and social expectations. In the modern age we are facing unprecedented political crises; climate emergency, queerphobia, the rise of alt right and white supremacy – to mention just a few. Can one make sense of the modern world by looking at the political and literary landscape of the past? This seminar is an invitation to do just that. It explores canonical literary texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of politically engaged theory and activist-oriented work for social justice. It draws on (eco)feminism, queer theory, early modern trans studies and critical race theory to investigate the historical formations of gender, race and able-bodidness.

Queering the Canon: Selected Queer Literature Across the Ages

prof. UAM dr hab. Katarzyna Burzyńska

In this course, we will explore selected novels and dramas from Anglo-American literature that embrace queerness, investigate queer issues, and represent diverse queer identities across different historical periods. Each modern novel chosen for analysis reimagines or adapts a canonical text whose queer dimensions have only recently been fully acknowledged. We begin with Nicole Galland’s Boy, a semi-fictional account of Alexander Cooke’s life as a boy actor playing female roles on the Shakespearean stage, and place it in dialogue with queer- and feminist-oriented scholarship on Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. We then turn to the understated homoeroticism of Hamlet and Horatio’s friendship as a lens for reading Em X. Liu’s science-fiction retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, The Death I Gave Him, where generative AI is delightfully queered. Next, we return to the origins of science fiction with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, pairing it with Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, a love story with a trans protagonist at its heart. Finally, we examine Virginia Woolf’s Orlando alongside Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl to consider the queer power of shapeshifting. Whether you’re a Shakespeare buff, a science-fiction lover, an adaptation enthusiast, or simply curious about the cultural implications of generative AI, you are warmly invited to join this course and reflect on the state of the modern world through the prism of queer literature.

Bibliography

  • you will need to obtain copies of texts mentioned in the descriptions (I have paper copies I can share if you’re unable to find them).

Proseminars for ESLC — pair 3

Victorian literature and culture: the study of Charles Dickens’s Great Epectations

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Setecka

The seminar aims to respond to the still growing fascination with Victorian literature and culture evident in neo-Victorian literature, films and even fashion. It will concentrate on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), which will be analysed in its cultural context and treated as a source of information on Victorian culture and literary conventions. I propose reading the novel in parts, to reflect the way it was originally published, and treating each part as a point of departure for discussing an aspect of Victorian culture, ranging from the Victorian imperialism, laws concerning women, legitimacy, inheritance, Victorian sensationalism, the construction of class, to realism in fiction. This is why the reading of the novel will be accompanied by other materials, including but not limited to literary and non-literary texts from the period.

The aim of this seminar is to expand students’ knowledge of Victorian literature and culture, to expose the all too frequent stereotypes and myths about the period and to provide a wider literary and cultural context for Victorian literature. Students will also learn to understand cultural signs and improve their skills of analysing literary (and non-literary) texts.

Joseph Conrad’s fiction

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Setecka

In her extremely well received 2017 book, The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff presents “migration, terrorism, the tension between global capitalism and nationalism, the promise and peril of a technological and communications revolution” as the forces that influenced the writing of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Although he is often remembered for his fictions set in exotic lands, in distant colonies of European empires, Conrad was also acutely aware of the revolutionary forces fomenting in the Russian empire. Himself a naturalised British citizen of Polish origin, with an experience of life in the land occupied by the Russian empire, who spent much of his life in the cosmopolitan environment of the merchant navy, writing in his third language, Conrad could offer new and often disturbing insights into the nature of imperialism and the complex relations between imperialism, capitalism and the system of human values.

This seminar aims at expanding the students’ knowledge of Joseph Conrad’s writing and explore both the thematic variety of his fictions and his experimentation with the form and genre. The texts discussed in class will include mostly his shorter fictions, which will be analysed in the historical and political context.