M.A. programme in English Philology: First year of study: Methodology workshops — summer term 2025–2026

What is this list?

This is a list of methodology workshops (Polish: warsztaty metodologiczne) we intend to launch in the summer term (October–February) in our full-time M.A. programme in English philology (Filologia angielska) whose first 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 second term of the first year of their full-time M.A. programme: this is your reference point before your enrolment into the courses;
  2. Candidates for our full-time programmes: this list gives you a snapshot of what courses were on offer for the study cycle that started in October 2025.

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted first by the discipline (linguistics precedes literary studies ) and then by the name of the teacher. The format of the entries is as follows: the title of the subject seminar, the name of the teacher, and the description of the course.

Linguistics

Qualitative Inquiry

Prof. Michael Bamberg

This course is a hands-on methods/methodology class in qualitative data analysis. It includes seven modules, each ending with a test-case assessment (=seven altogether) and a final reflection paper that requires students to review their learning journey and outline how the methods learned might relate to their MA project. Most of this training happens in class. Therefore, attendance and participation during class are essential. The seven modules are (i) people watching in the Kyoto train station (ethnography), (ii) advertising and positioning the brand during COVID (Pfizer, Madonna, Trump, Billy Graham, and Headspace), (iii) positioning the criminal (from closing arguments in the courtroom), (iv) “Betty tells her story” (twice-told stories), (v) positioning selves and others: navigation responsibility (politicians/celebrities publicly apologizing), (vi) positioning a masculine self in constructing the female other (ten-years-olds in conversation), (vii) fifteen years on the dating-market (tales from a 60-year-old’s life-stories). To get a sense for some of the background assumptions for this course, here are two recent resources:

  • Bamberg, M. (2024).Positioning, narrative practices, and positioning theory. In M.B. McVee, L. Van Langenhove, C.H. Brock & B.A. Christensen (Eds.) The Routledge international handbook of positioning theory (pp. 4257). Routledge
  • Bamberg, M. (2021). Master and counter narratives. Same facts – different stories. Research Outreach – Connecting science with society, 122, 126. [external link]

Introduction to research with human participants

dr Iga Krzysik

Have you ever wondered how researchers figure out how we process language? How they design experiments that can capture the split-second processes of language comprehension? This course explores these questions through an introduction to research with human participants, primarily in language processing.

You will explore the core principles of experimental design: formulating research questions and testable hypotheses, manipulating variables, and assessing whether your study truly measures what you intend. You will also learn to critically read published research reports, understand how findings are presented, and draw your own informed conclusions.

The course covers the practical aspects of research as well, including how experimental results are reported. We will introduce both descriptive and inferential statistics at a beginner-friendly level. Research does not happen in a vacuum, so we will also address the ethical dimensions of working with human participants—the principles and standards that guide our work, and how these considerations shape every stage of research.

In addition, we will survey a range of methods used to study language processing, from reaction-time measures to EEG and fMRI, providing a helpful overview of the broader methodological landscape in the field.

If you are interested in empirical linguistic studies with human participants (especially if you are considering conductingsuch studies as part of your MA project), this course will give you an introduction to methods and skills required to pursue them.

Theoretical linguistics

prof. UAM dr hab. Bartosz Wiland

The aim of the course is to familiarize the students with basic theoretical tools that will enable them to correctly describe, classify, compare and analize linguistic forms. In particular, the focus of the course is on basic elements of languages: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and basic lexical semantics. Practical methods of obtaining specific linguistic data (i.e. data points required to carry out specific linguistic tasks), such as the use of corpora, conducting field research, experimental methods (Magneto-EncephaloGraphy, Electro-EncephaloGraphy, eye-tracking), or designing an experiment will also be discussed.

An important aim of the course is to allow the students to acquire the ability to practically apply the knowledge and skills – both in their work on individual MA projects in linguistics, as well as in teaching, translation, and other work related to the conscious application of linguistic knowledge.

During the lectures, students will learn how to properly describe and classify the linguistic data, make cross-linguistic comparisons, and base theoretical analyses in both typologically diverse as well as more similar languages (e.g., English, Polish, North Saami, Yaqui, Czech, Ukrainian, Italian, etc.).

Teaching methods

lectures, audio-visual presentations, in-class discussions

Major topics

  1. Basics of linguistic description, comparison, and data analysis in the domains of phonetics (general, British vs. American English vs. Polish, etc.), phonology, morphology, syntax, basic lexical semantics.
  2. How different languages differ and how they don’t: what to look for in the linguistic data.
  3. Methods of linguistic data collection and classification: the use of corpora, linguistic fieldwork, experimental methods (questionnaires, EEG, MEG, eye-tracking, etc.)

Credit requirements

  1. active participation (attendance and participation: 50%)
  2. a short end-of-semester test (50%)

Literary studies

Reading the More-than-Human: Ecocriticism and Posthumanism

prof. UAM dr hab. Paulina Ambroży

This methodological workshop introduces MA students to the critical intersections of ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism, with a particular focus on how literature registers the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds. We will explore climate grief, deep time, object-oriented ontology, transversality, and the technological gaze, asking how contemporary theory reshapes the reading of ecopoetry and ecological fiction. Through close reading, theoretical engagement, and seminar discussion, students will consider how texts reimagine agency, temporality, and interdependence across species and objects. Each week pairs foundational theoretical texts with short fiction and ecopoetry, offering both methodological grounding and opportunities for interpretive practice.

Objectives: By the end of the workshop, students will have an informed understanding of the dominant methodologies, representatives and current critical debates related to the Posthuman and Ecocritical Turn. They will also develop skills of critical thinking, literary analysis and academic discussion based on the theoretically informed readings of the assigned texts.

Requirements: Attendance, annotated and careful reading of the assigned texts; active participation in class discussion, one in-class essay at the end of the course.

Comparative Studies

dr Joanna Jarząb-Napierała

The aim of the course is to familiarize students with the notion of comparative studies in theory and practice. Comparative literature, which perceives national literatures as insufficiently representative of more general tendencies when analysed in isolation, focuses on the dialogue initiated by different modern literatures. This dialogue, whether mutual or one-sided, not only enhances their development but also provides a platform for comparison on various levels. Students in the course will have the opportunity to see how comparative studies point to the universality of certain literary phenomena while simultaneously highlighting local diversities that reflect literatures’ tendencies to balance between the universal and the local. Since the classes have a ‘workshop’ character, students will conduct a small comparative project of their own to see how comparative studies theories can be applied to particular literary texts.

Queer theory

dr Marcin Markowicz

Queer theory can be broadly understood as a set of frameworks that challenge normative categories of gender and sexuality, exposing how these categories are socially constructed and maintained within existing power structures.

This workshop is designed as an introduction to foundational and more contemporary texts and thinkers in queer theory. It will follow a thematic rather than chronological approach, one that will familiarize students with the genealogy of queer theory and major developments in the field from the 1990s until now. Selected concepts to be discussed include gender performativity, queerness and feminism, queer of color critique, intersectionality, queerness and Indigeneity, queer time, queer reading, queer utopia, and queer affect.

Each class will be based on close reading and discussion of assigned theoretical texts. Occasionally, students will be asked to read short fiction or poetry and then analyze it using a given theoretical framework. Upon finishing the course, students will have basic knowledge of selected queer theories, which they will be able to develop and apply in their M.A. projects.

This workshop is recommended for all students wishing to explore queerness, identity, gender, sexuality, and intersectionality (but not only) in their M.A. papers. Anyone interested in the topic and ready to tackle challenging but thought provoking and enriching texts is welcome.

Credit for the course: attendance, completion of reading assignments and short written assignments, active participation in discussions.

Selected bibliography:

  • Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
  • Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.
  • Butler, Judith. 1993. “Critically Queer”, GLQ 1: 17-32.
  • Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen. 2011. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. The University of Arizona Press.
  • Eng, David L., J. Halberstam, José E. Muñoz (eds.). 2005. “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”, special issue of Social Text 84-85.
  • Ferguson, Roderick. 2003. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Colour Critique. University of Minnessota Press.
  • Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Perverse Modernities. Duke University Press.
  • Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press.
  • Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press.
  • McCann, Hanah and Whitney Monaghan. 2020. Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures. Macmillan.
  • Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications. Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Muñoz, José Esteban. [2009] 2019. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press.
  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press.
  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You”, in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Duke University Press.
  • Sullivan, Nikki. 2003. A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh University Press.
  • Warner, Michael. 1993. Introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. University of Minnesota Press.

Postcolonial and diasporic methodologies

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Rzepa

The aim of the workshop is to familiarize students with major premises of postcolonial and diasporic studies as they apply to literature, and give them an opportunity to practice using postcolonial and diasporic frameworks in literary analysis. Postcolonial and diasporic literary theory and criticism are broad interdisciplinary approaches to literature, strongly rooted in historical and contemporary political, social and cultural processes. While the two approaches often come together, it is not always so: the field of postcolonial literary studies focuses on diverse aspects of processes related to colonialism/neocolonialism and decolonisation as they affect or are reflected in literature; while diasporic literary studies examines texts related in different ways to the scattering of diverse national, racial and ethnic groups of people all over the world, often (though not always) as a result or in connection to (post)colonial processes. We will use selected key concepts (such as hybridity, mimicry, subalternity, etc.) to enter and explore the broad and multifaceted fields.