M.A. thesis supervisors 2024–2026

What is this list?

This is a list of M.A. thesis supervisors for the full-time M.A. programme in English Philology (Filologia angielska) at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, for the 2024–2026 two-year study cycle

What about these supervisors?

M.A. students in English Philology should secure the collaboration of an M.A. thesis supervisor as soon as possible, and no later than January 15th 2025, choosing from the list provided below.

They will be supported in the process of finding a supervisor by M.A. programme coordinators: Prof. Agnieszka Rzepa — literary/cultural studies or Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak — linguistics.

Here are some simple steps:

  1. As an M.A. student, once you have identified a potential supervisor, you should initiate contact with them via email. We suggest that in your correspondence you state why you are approaching this particular professor, and why your research interests and goals are a good match.
  2. Potential supervisors may request a CV, description of research interests, copy of B.A .paper and/or other relevant information/materials before inviting you for an interview.
  3. If the potential supervisor agrees, you should communicate by email to the relevant M.A. program coordinator that the professor has agreed to formally supervise your M.A. thesis.
  4. The potential supervisor will receive a copy of the email and confirm by a return email to the relevant coordinator that they have formally agreed to supervise the thesis.
  5. The confirmation email from the supervisor must reach the coordinator by January 30th 2025 at the latest.

How to navigate the list?

The list is sorted first by the discipline (literary/cultural studies precede linguistics) and then by the name of the potential M.A. thesis supervisors in that discipline. Click on the name of the potential supervisor to browse their profile page in this website.

Literary/cultural studies

prof. UAM dr hab. Dagmara Drewniak

The topics of potential M.A. projects I can supervise should focus on various aspects of Canadian literature such as migrant and multicultural literature in Canada, Canadian life writing (diaries, memoirs, autobiographies and biographies) and postcolonial literature. The prospective candidates seeking my supervision should be willing to study different texts of Canadian migrant and diasporic literature (novels, poetry, autobiographical narratives), published in this multicultural and cosmopolitan country. Comparative theses are also welcome.

Examples of past M.A. theses written under my supervision:

  • “The question of identity and social positioning of Jewish community in Canadian literature”
  • “The legacy of slavery in contemporary Canadian literature”
  • “Representations of queer women in selected memoirs by contemporary Canadian authors”

prof. UAM dr hab. Joanna Maciulewicz

My research interests focus on eighteenth-century British literature and culture. I’ll be happy to supervise M.A. theses focusing on diverse aspects of the long eighteenth century, such as:

  • eighteenth-century popular literature
  • theories of the rise of the novel
  • transnational history of the early novel
  • representations of the eighteenth century in today’s culture (e.g. in TV shows, historical fiction etc.)
  • historical and neohistorical fiction, particularly neo-Georgian novel
  • the history of the book and print studies: the rise of print market and its influence on literary creation
  • history of reading
  • print and digital book cultures
  • history of fan fiction

prof. UAM dr hab. Paweł Stachura

Research interests

  • American literature
  • American narrative media: plots, characters, rhetorics
  • particularly interested in new and old pop genre fiction (detective, adventure, scifi and fantasy, romance, melodrama)

Suggested themes of theses

  • American stock characters: vampires, superheroes, princesses, detectives, pioneers, adventurers, aliens, monsters
  • unusual narrative media in the USA: games, TV shows, films
  • history of American fiction, particularly 19th century: Irving, Cooper, Sedgwick, Hawthorne, Melville, Louisa May Alcott, naturalism and realism, local-color fiction
  • pop fiction and bestsellers in the 20th century (more recently too): Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pearl S. Buck, Asimov, Jones, Michener, LeGuin, Andre Norton, Herman Wouk, Erich Segal, Robert Ludlum, James Clancy, Jodie Picould (just a selection)
  • American ethnic fiction and Black fiction
  • recent American regional fiction: Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Kingsolver, Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy

Sample titles

  • The use of elements from Japanese folklore in contemporary American young adult fiction and the future of folklore
  • Asian Americans in fiction. Representation of migrant identity in Jhumpa Lahiri's and Vanessa Hua's fiction
  • The theme of death in Edgar Allan Poe’s selected works
  • The image and perception of women in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction
  • Fate, free will, determinism. American naturalist writers
  • Social themes in selected contemporary American horror films
  • The Modern Witchcraft as a Cultural Phenomenon
  • The Scarlet Letter as a Romance
  • Female monstrosity in recent American literature
  • Representation of Women in Contemproary American Cinema

Linguistics

prof. UAM dr hab. Anna Balas

My research interests include second and third language acquisition of speech, especially phonetic cross-linguistic similarity. Most of my papers focus on non-native speech perception, but I have also investigated speech production and the link between the two. I have just begun a project on multilingual speech perception among listeners with L1 Ukrainian, L2 English and L3 Polish funded by the National Science Center, Poland. I have also been involved in outreach activities at the Bilingualism Matters@Poznań branch, promoting bilingualism, language awareness and research-based language policy among teenagers, teachers and policy makers.

If you have ever wondered why humans perceive the world the way they do, and especially why we perceive or produce speech in our second or third languages differently than their native speakers, I encourage you to pursue your interests working towards an MA thesis related to perception or production of non-native sounds or processes. I can assist you in planning your research, formulating precise research questions, choosing appropriate methodology (be it one of traditional behavioral tests, training, audio-visual experiments, etc.) and an experimental group among children, adolescents, adults or seniors and provide you with constructive feedback during the write-up process.

prof. UAM dr hab. Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman

My research interests:

  • Experimental pragmatics (how do we know what others mean)
  • Neurolinguistics (language in the brain)
  • Bilingual brain (does the bilingual brain differ form the monolingual one)
  • Affect and language (how emotional states modulate language processing)
  • Bilingualism and Foreign Language Effect (are bilinguals less emotional, and/or less moral in their L2)
  • Theory of Mind (how do people mindread others)
  • Figurative language processing (what we need to know about irony and ironic state of mind)

Researching language in communication is fascinating! Here come some questions that keep me inspired and drive my investigations: mechanisms of the evolution and acquisition of languages; what drives us to communicate the contents of our minds (thoughts and feelings); what mechanisms enable the comprehension of what others mean by what they communicate; what is the role of affect (emotions, feelings) in communication; how do we acquire the mindreading ability; is the native language entirely, and the foreign language only partially embodied; how do we embody a language; how do we capture implicit meanings; how the mindset (e.g., moods, or languages of operation) constraints cognitive processes; are bilinguals less moral when they make their decisions in L2; are bilinguals more creative in their L2;

Some sample titles of recently supervised MA theses:

  • How does language modulate the processing of emotional contents in the native and the foreign language
  • Effects of intimacy, affect, and bilingualism on communicative interaction: hyperscanning study on Polish-English bilinguals
  • The influence of perceptible heartbeat sounds on affective language processing in English (L2) and Polish (L1)
  • The impact of stress on the processing of emotion words in the first and second language of Polish-English bilinguals
  • Mood effects on affective words processing: A response time study
  • Testing lexical predictions in audio-visual modality: an EFL study
  • Smile perception: The effect of smiling on speech comprehension in English as a Foreign Language
  • Exploring the Effect of Music-Induced Mood on Language Creativity
  • How bilinguals generate creative ideas in their first and second language: An Evoked Response Potentials Study
  • Are highly sensitive bilinguals immune to the Foreign Language Effect? Virtual Reality Study
  • What we say and what we mean: research on irony processing in auditory and audio-visual contexts
  • Varying degrees of context saturation in cheat detection: An EFL study
  • Hearing irony: An EFL study based on dialogic interactions from the TV sitcom Friends

prof. dr hab. Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk

Research areas

  • Phonology and phonetics, phonostylistics
  • Phonotactics of consonant clusters across languages, morphonotactics
  • Natural Phonology, Natural Linguistics
  • Language acquisition: L1, L2, multilingual
  • Phonological typology, endangered languages
  • Interdisciplinary research on sounds, using theories and tools from other disciplines
  • Unorthodox approaches to the study of language

MA students look for a linguistic problem they’d like to solve and which concerns sounds of a language (any language, as long as they have some knowledge of it, and otherwise with a preference for English, Polish, German). The problem may come from the observation of any form of speech (casual, child, second language, disturbed, etc) or it may be a purely theoretical question which requires research across languages. So, the students start with asking “Why?”. A solution may, but doesn’t have to, lead to an application (e.g. in teaching, translation, therapy, media, etc).

Selected MA theses’ titles I’ve supervised

  • A case study of a bilingual Polish-English infant from the perspective of natural linguistics.
  • The function of phonological processes in the lyrics performed by singers in their L1 and L2.
  • Phonological variation across speech pathologies.
  • The (positive) influence of first language phonological processes on learning other languages.
  • Spoken-word recognition in Polish-English bilingual speakers: an eye-tracking study
  • The acquisition of #sC clusters in phonologically disabled children (Polish vs. English)
  • The role of personality traits in second language acquisition.
  • Acquisition vs. learning: A neurolinguistic approach to second language phonology.
  • The influence of phonological differences between Ostródzki dialect and Standard Polish on the acquisition of English vowels.
  • Lisping of the speakers of Polish and its influence on the acquisition of English.
  • Evolutionary linguistic approach to SLA.
  • Influence of facial muscles development and articulatory setting on the second language acquisition of English.
  • A synchronic investigation of leftmost /s/+stops.
  • Problems in understanding reduplication and its relationship with other concepts such as sound symbolism in the linguistic literature.
  • Black South African English as an indigenous lingua franca.
  • Phonotactic and morphonotactic probabilities and frequencies: a study on Polish and English simple and complex words.
  • Endangered languages in Northern Europe: The impact of English and the dominant language on phonological and morphological processing of Saami in Sweden, Norway and Finland.
  • Comparative analysis of phonotactics and morphonotactics of word-initial clusters of English, Russian and Ukrainian.
  • The role of dominant languages and English as a lingua franca in the revitalisation of minority languages: The case of Wymysiöeryś.
  • Enjoy the silence. The frequency of glottalization in British singers.
  • The influence of orthographic representation on learners' of English perception of schwa.

prof. UAM dr hab. Anna Ewert

Research fields: bilingualism, language and cognition, second language acquisition, bilingual education

Current research interests:

My theoretical position is the multi-competence perspective (Cook 2016). I am particularly interested in how the multiple languages interact in an L2 user’s mind and how they interact with general cognitive processes. Potential factors to explore are how this interaction is modulated by individual factors, such as language proficiency, and contextual factors, for example language use practices in electronic media environments. Potential research projects could focus on how bilinguals/L2 users use and/or process language while categorizing objects, describing people or events, or comprehending emotions, how they process vocabulary and figurative language, how they form concepts, or how they make sense of linguistic meanings, and how they acquire language incidentally. My other research interest is bilingual education, especially bilingual literacy acquisition and teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about bilingualism.

I have been recently involved in two large international collaborations. To find out more about my interests, please follow the links: TEAM [external link] (project leader), MABEL [external link]

Keywords: bilingual lexical and semantic processing, bilingual concepts, L2 embodiment, linguistic relativity, thinking for speaking, L2 effect on L1, incidental acquisition, L2 users’ language practices, bilingual literacy acquisition, teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about bilingualism

Sample titles of recently supervised MA theses:

  • Abstract emotional language embodiment in L1 Chinese and L2 English: A valence-space association study in a web-based vertical paradigm
  • Lexical access in bilinguals: Are bilingual speakers at a disadvantage?
  • First language object naming by Polish-English bilinguals
  • Categorization of body parts by monolinguals and bilinguals

prof. UAM dr hab. Piotr Gąsiorowski

I can conduct MA projects in the following research areas: historical linguistics, linguistic typology, processes of language change, evolutionary linguistics, phonological theory, dialectology, sociolinguistic variation, varieties of English, linguistic diversity and its protection.

Here are some sample titles of master’s theses successfully submitted under my supervision in recent years:

  • Nasal vowels in English and Polish. A comparative analysis and a sociolinguistic study
  • Naming landscape features in the nineteenth century dialect of Cumbria
  • The sociolinguistics of the Birmingham diphthong shift
  • Variation in strut and bath in the Stratford upon Avon area
  • The acoustics and functions of paralinguistic clicks in English
  • The role of the BBC in shaping mainstream British English
  • California English intonation and its reflection in sitcom language
  • The evolution of English dental fricatives: variation and change

prof. UAM dr hab. Michael Hornsby

Professor Hornsby has worked on minority language sociolinguistics, particularly in a Celtic context, but also on Yiddish and Lemko (Rusyn), resulting in a monograph on language revitalisation in these languages in 2015 (Palgrave Macmillan). He has also recently begun to work on minority languages and issues of LGBTQ* representation with a number of colleagues based in Ireland, Wales and Catalonia. He is currently supervising a number of MA theses looking at translanguaging in Japan, language revitalisation efforts on the Isle of Mann and in Poland and the bilingual practices of Welsh online gamers

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak

My areas of academic research are sociolinguistics and discourse studies. I have also worked on early modern history of English and Polish. In recent years I have done research and published on language and communication in different social contexts, such as politics, gender relations and healthcare. Moreover, language and age; intergenerational communication.

Within language and gender studies, I am especially interested in the current social change and the related developments in various languages as well as social activism for gender justice.

I have recently co-designed teaching programmes on communication in healthcare. I am particularly dedicated to improving communication for better health and well-being. Therefore, I believe language and communication experts should be trained to support patients’ causes and doctors’ professional help.

The following are a few examples of MA theses I supervised in the recent years:

  • From specialist English to non-specialist Polish: Selected issues in (interlingual) translation and (intralingual) reformulation of medical texts
  • The significance of language-related and socio-cultural barriers for access to healthcare: The case of L1 Spanish speakers in the United States
  • Interpersonal emotion regulation in medical interventions and patient compliance with treatment: A sociophonetic study
  • People who could not care less about phonetics: Communicative efficiency of Poles speaking English
  • Perceptions of gender and political leadership in the contest of the latest presidential campaign in the U.S.
  • Redefining masculinity through veganism: A multimodal discourse analysis of vegan men’s Instagram accounts
  • Discursive techniques in political marketing in social media: a case study of general parliamentary elections in India in 2014

prof. UAM dr hab. Karolina Krawczak-Glynn

My research interests focus on corpus-based approaches to modeling human behavior and culture. Questions that I address in my research concern variables that determine the choice of one lexeme over another, or one grammatical construction over another, or one conceptualization of the same perceived situation over another. These are important questions that enable scientists to better understand how language works, how the human mind works and what the relation is between language, culture and cognition. This research in often multimodal and includes all dimension of human communication and culture, from facial expressions and body language through to lexis and grammar.

Theoretically, my work is grounded in Functional and Cognitive Linguistics. Methodologically, I employ a combination of qualitative annotation of linguistic data and their quantitative analysis. Multivariate statistical analyses visualize complex relations and identify emergent patterns, while machine learning methods, such as regression analysis, enable us to model and predict human behavior. I would be happy to supervise projects, be it at the level of BA, MA or PhD, within such areas of research.

Below, you can find some examples of topics covered in the works that I have supervised (listed alphabetically):

  • A cross-linguistic analysis of the metaphorical representation of mental disorders (and other diseases) in online discussions (in English and Chinese)
  • A cross-linguistic analysis of the representation of various minority groups (e.g., transgender people or homosexual women) in online discussions (e.g., in English, French or Polish)
  • A cross-linguistic and cross-cultural analysis of the conceptualization of various emotions (e.g., pride, regret) in online settings, films or songs (e.g., in English, Chinese, Polish, etc.)
  • A multimodal analysis of interactional humor in sitcoms
  • A multimodal analysis of stance taking in English and Chinese, based on selected television series
  • A multimodal and critical discourse analysis of the representation of femininity in films or magazines

prof. UAM dr hab. Hanna Rutkowska

My areas of research—and simultaneously the areas in which you can prepare your MA projects under my supervision—cover: language variation and change, (historical) sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics, standardization, text and genre, visual pragmatics, multimodality, historical orthography and typography.

Examples of titles of MA theses which I (have) supervised:

  • “Researching medieval English scripts: between palaeography and machine learning”
  • “Multimodal genres on Facebook: a case study”
  • “Lexical-semantic change in English of the Victorian era on the basis of Manchester Evening News”
  • “Polish-English code-switching on social media platforms: a sociolinguistic study”
  • “Linguistic portrayal of women in British nineteenth-century press”
  • “The features and functions of Spanglish in selected American songs”
  • “Latin loanwords in Early Modern English: a case study of two books by John Milton”
  • “Attitudes to Welsh and to English in modern Wales and their historical motivation”
  • “Patterns of capitalization in the journals of nineteenth-century American explorers Lewis and Clark”

prof. UAM dr. hab. Bartosz Wiland

I’ll be happy to help you with an MA project in any area of syntax and morphology (general, English, Polish, comparative Slavic, theoretical, dialectal, etc.) and the relation between grammar and other components of language (meaning, lexicon, phonology, or cognition). I will be especially eager to help you with a project on Nanosyntax. Possible MA projects can deal with any aspect of grammar and lexicon and can range from description of a grammatical phenomenon, to comparisons of grammatical constructions or categories between English and another language, to interaction between morphology and phonology, to more general conceptual questions such as whether large language models like ChatGPT are adequate models of human linguistic cognition.

Selected titles of recently supervised MA theses:

  • Grammatical differences between varieties of English.
  • Pre- and post-nominal adjectives in English and Spanish.
  • The grammar of English idioms.
  • A nanosyntactic analysis of selected locative categories in English and Norwegian.
  • An analysis of linguistic aspects of constructed languages in video games.
  • Sentential negation in English.
  • Possessive genitives in English and Polish.
  • VP ellipsis in English and Polish.