Second-year of study M.A. subject seminars for winter term 2025–2026

What is this list?

This is a list of subject seminars (Polish: seminaria przedmiotowe) we intend to launch in the winter term (October–February) in our full-time M.A. programme in English philology (Filologia angielska) whose second 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 year of their full-time M.A. programme: this is your reference point before your enrolment into subject seminars;
2. Candidates for our full-time programme in English philology: this list gives you a snapshot of what subject seminars were on offer for the study cycle that started in 2024.

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted first by the discipline (literary studies precede linguistics) 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 subject seminar.

Literary studies

Queering Canadian Literature

dr Marcin Markowicz

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 by attending to a range of critical and creative texts by Canadian authors.

This course is reading intensive, which means you will be asked to complete a reading assignment every week (short texts mostly; one or two short novels). You do not need any prior knowledge of Canadian literature, but it is more than welcome.

Credit requirements: attendance (1 unexcused absence allowed), active participation in discussions, timely completion of homework assignments (2 assignments per semester apart from obligatory reading).

A history of the mind and emotions: Early English mentalities

dr Jacek Olesiejko

This seminar brings early medieval English (Old English) literature into a broad conversation with the field of the history of emotion. While some emotions are said to be hard-wired into the human mind (for example, fear), scholars from such fields as anthropology, history, literary studies and others insist that emotion has a history because forms of its expression as well as emotion talk are not universal. Rather, it is argued that emotions are inflected by such material and cultural factors as gender, historical change, social class, the relationship with the nonhuman environment, and others. This seminar focuses on the conventions of the representation of the mind and emotion in Old English verse. It will focus on the Exeter elegies and the concept of the mind as an enclosure and treasure-chamber (The Wanderer) as well as the vibrant relationship between the human mind and the natural environment (for example, the avian mind in The Seafarer), the proud mind of Satan and the rhetorical skills of the dangerously intelligent devils in biblical poetry and hagiographic verse, mental control in heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon), as well as wonder and the sublime (representations of monsters in the “monstrous” texts of the Beowulf-Manuscript). During first classes, students will be familiarised with different theories about emotion (e.g. anthropological and cognitive) as well as the history of emotions (ideas on emotion in Antiquity, Stoic philosophy, ideas on emotion in early medieval thought). Discussion of literary texts will follow the theoretical part to examine early English mentalities in Old English poetry.

The course credit will be awarded on the basis of a presentation given to the group during classes as well as active participation in classroom discussion.

Race, home, and (un)belonging in texts by Canadian black and multiracial writers

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Rzepa

The course is devoted to race, home and (un)belonging as theoretical concepts and lived experience. Literary texts by Canadian black and multiracial writers which reflect and fictionalize this experience, and reflect on it, will be read against the background of historical and social realities, and broader theoretical approaches to the three concepts. The texts to be discussed represent a variety of genres—life writing (memoirs, personal essays, etc.), fiction, poetry and drama—and literary periods (with focus on 20^th and 21^st c. texts). We will also at times venture beyond Canada to consider other cultural and historical contexts (especially those of the USA and the Caribbean) as well as issues related to worldwide black diaspora in general.

Nineteenth-century short fiction

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Setecka

Shorter fictions, including sketches, tales, novellas and short stories, constitute an important element of the Victorian literary landscape, although they tend to get less critical attention than the long three-decker novel of the period. Shorter literary forms gained their popularity as the nineteenth century progressed, a phenomenon which reflected the transformations in the publishing market, and especially the constant growth of periodical publishing, as well as the changing expectations of readers, growing in number after Forster’s Education Act of 1870, and desiring to incorporate their reading into their increasingly hectic lives.

The seminar will concentrate on the discussion of Victorian short fiction in a wider cultural context of the nineteenth century. The texts are selected to enable the students to observe the thematic and generic variety of short fiction as well as the changing literary conventions, and thus trace the transformations in the literary market of the time. They will include works by most recognised writers of the time, like Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, but also by writers of lesser renown, and now often forgotten, like Harriet Martineau.

Linguistics

Bilingual brain

prof. UAM dr hab. Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman

Bilingualism is the linguistic norm at present-day world. Most people use two or more languages on their daily basis for work, for school, or for fun. This begs a range of questions, i.e., does having two language systems, rather than one, change brain’s anatomy, structure, organization, as well as cognitive capacity in bilinguals. Does having a bilingual brain improve mental fitness, or does it tax it, so that we underperform in both linguistic systems? Is it advantageous to have more than one language system?

This course provides answers to the above questions on top of an up-to-date introduction to the neuroscience of bilingual brain. We will study neural networks involved in speaking, listening, reading and writing, and how these networks expand to cater for additional linguistic system, and how such factors as frequency of language usage, proficiency, age of acquisition, mode of acquisition, sequence of acquisition, or language dominance further modify the executive powers of language networks.

We will also look at the bilingual brain vis a vis recent research on embodied language and will examine evidence showing that the second language is somewhat disembodied. If you want to find out why you choose to express love, and swear in your L1, but prefer to lie, apologize, or talk about the traumatic experiences in your L2, join the course!

References (selected)

• Buchweitz, A. and Prat, C. 2013. The bilingual brain: Flexibility and control in the human cortex. Physics of Life Reviews, [external link]
• Costa, A. 2019. The Bilingual Brain. And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language. Penguin Books Ltd.
• Costa, A. and Sebastián-Gallés, N. 2014. How does the bilingual experience sculpt the brain? Nature Reviews, 15,337.
• Kemmerer, D. 2015. Cognitive Neuroscience of Language. New York: Psychology Press.
• Mechelli, A., Crinion, J.,Noppeney, U.,O’Doherty, J.,Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R. and Price, C. 2004. Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Proficiency in a second language and age at acquisition affect grey-matter density. Nature, 431:14.
• Pliatsikas, C. 2020. Understanding structural plasticity in the bilingual brain: The Dynamic Restructuring Model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–13. [external link]
• Wong, B., Bin Yin, and Beth O’Brien. 2016 Neurolinguistics: Structure, Function, and Connectivity in the Bilingual Brain. BioMed Research International, Article ID 7069274. [external link]

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Features, elements, rules, and constraints in phonology

dr Grzegorz Michalski

This course is about formal analysis in phonology. We will discover the major tenets of historically-important flavours of so-called generative phonology — SPE, Lexical Phonology, Government Phonology, and Optimality Theory, as well as the major difference in the approach to substance — distinctive features vs. Element Theory.

We will see what a phonological analysis looks like and we will try to do some of our own. We will observe a number of phenomena in English, Polish, and other languages, and realize how much they (do not) make sense when looked at from the right perspective. We will read some more or less boring texts (20–30 pages per week), and we will discuss them as enthusiastically as we can.

Your grade for this course is a sum of two areas:

• participation in the weekly discussion (50%),
• graded assignments (50%).

This course is for everyone who is preparing an M.A. paper in linguistics, not necessarily in phonology.