Full-time M.A. programme in English Philology: M.A. thesis supervisors 2025–2027

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 2025–2027 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 15^th 2026, 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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
The confirmation email from the supervisor must reach the coordinator by January 30^th 2026 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. Katarzyna Burzyńska

Office: Room 359

My research interests revolve around feminist and queer analyses of early modern English drama. I investigate Shakespeare and his contemporaries in light of gender theory, (eco)feminism and queer studies. I am also interested in activist-oriented literary analysis that serves discussions on social justice in modernity and how Shakespeare’s drama and its adaptations can be used to forward modern debates on current crises.

I can supervise MA theses:

analyzing conceptualizations of gender and gender roles in early modern and modern culture,
analyzing queer lives and queer identities in early modern culture and early modern English drama (with a focus on Shakespeare and his contemporaries),
analyzing modern adaptations and appropriations of Shakespearean drama (film, series, games, graphic novels, other media).

My recent publications:

Chapter 43. “Renaissance Literature as Trans Literature”, in The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature [external link] Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, Sabine Sharp, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group (2024); part of DOI: [external link];
“‘The finny subject of the sea’: Thaisa’s pregnant embodiment and (non)maternal identity in Pericles”, Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (114)(1) (2024) pp. 119-132, DOI: [external link];
Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford: A Phenomenology of Pregnancy in English Early Modern Drama (2022). New York: Routledge. DOI: [external link].

For more see here: Google Scholar [external link]

A selection of BA topics I supervised:

Transmasculine identities in selected early modern English dramas (Kas Olejniczak)
Non-binary identities in selected English early modern dramas (Salem Stępień)
Queering male friendships in selected Shakespearean plays (Sandra Harendziak)

If you are interested in writing your MA thesis with me, contact me via email.

dr Jacek Olesiejko

Office: Room 202
E-mail

My main research interest is Old English literature (450 A.D.-1100). I publish on early medieval English poetry and prose. I am currently pursuing such fields as history of emotion, gender studies/women’s studies, ecocriticism, and new materialism (thing theory, literary representations of material culture).

I welcome students who would like to write about Old English literature. At least one chapter of the M.A. dissertation must be dedicated to the analysis of Old English literature. Other chapters may discuss texts in the English language that come from later periods but must bear some relevance to the study of Old English literature. The seminar does not require students to read Old English (bilingual editions with modern English translation will be suggested by the supervisor).

The following topics are encouraged in the seminar (other topics are also welcome as long as they remain relevant to the study of Old English and Middle English literature):

ecocriticism, ecofeminism, posthumanism (animal studies especially)
gender studies, masculinity studies, women’s studies
comparative analysis of medieval and contemporary representations of the monstrous and supernatural beings
history of emotion, horror, trauma (especially in heroic literature as well as in more contemporary war fiction)
Adaptations of medieval English literature (especially Beowulf) in contemporary fiction and media

My recent publications:

Olesiejko, Jacek. 2018. “The Grendelkin and the politics of succession at Heorot: The significance of monsters in Beowulf”, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 53, 45-65
Olesiejko, Jacek. 2021. „The Wonders of Creation: The Affective Poetics of Alterity in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle”, in: Rafał Borysławski and Alicja Bemben (eds.). Emotions as engines of history. (Routledge Studies in Cultural History). London and New York: Routledge, 9-24.
Olesiejko, Jacek. 2021. „Nebuchadnezzar’s mind and memory in Old English Daniel”, Studia Anglica Wraclaviensia 59, 65-90.
Olesiejko, Jacek. 2021. A review of: “Beowulf: A new translation”. By Maria Dahvana Headley, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 56, 693-715.
Olesiejko, Jacek. 2022. “Urban imagery in the Old English Exodus and its significance”, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 57, 5-32.
Olesiejko, Jacek. 2025. “The construction of authority in the Old English Judith”, Polish Journal of English Studies 10:2.

dr Małgorzata Olsza

Office: Room 228

My research interests revolve around contemporary American literature. I specialize in the study of American comics and graphic novels, reading them in feminist, environmental, intermedial, multimodal, and social contexts. The topics of potential M.A. theses I can supervise may engage with different aspects of contemporary American literature (that is broadly defined as published after WW2). Contemporary American literature is a vibrant field of study where identity, politics, society, gender, race, and class intertwine. You might choose to focus on a given author(s), text, theme, motif, genre, social problem, or formal question. You may also perform a comparative analysis.

My recent publications:

Olsza, Małgorzata. 2024. “The Female Body Politic and Beyond: Feminist Utopias and Dystopias in American Women’s Comix from the 1970s.” In: Comics, Activism, Feminisms. Ed. Kristy Beers Fägersten, Margareta Wallin Wictorin, Anna Nordenstam. Routledge Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Comics. Routledge, pp. 87-100. DOI:10.4324/9781003425397-9
Olsza, Małgorzata. 2022. “Comics in the Anthropocene: Graphic Narratives of Apocalypse, Regeneration and Warning.” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 12: 51-68. DOI:10.18778/2083-2931.12.03
Olsza, Małgorzata. 2022. “Towards Feminist Comics Studies: Feminist Art History and the Study of Women’s Comix in the 1970s in the United States.” In: Seeing Comics through Art History Alternative Approaches to the Form. Ed. Maggie Gray, Ian Horton. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185-206. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-93507-8

A selection of B.A. topics I have supervised:

The contemporary sublime in The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Multimodality in A visit from the goon squad by Jennifer Egan and Here by Richard McGuire
Race, class and social issues in the twenty-first century American literature in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

If you are interested in writing your M.A. thesis with me, contact me via email.

prof. UAM dr hab. Agnieszka Rzepa

Office: Room 339

I am a literary scholar specialising in contemporary Canadian literature. My research interests revolve around contemporary prose—novel, short story, life writing—especially memoirs and experimental life writing; magic realism; Indigenous literatures in Canada and ethnic minority literatures. I approach literary texts using feminist, postcolonial, diasporic and queer methodologies—among others.

I can supervise MA theses:

on Canadian literature of any period and genre (though preferably contemporary prose, including life writing)
comparing aspects of contemporary Canadian and US prose (including life writing)

My selected publications:

2009. Feats and Defeats of Memory: Exploring Spaces of Canadian Magic Realism. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM;
With Drewniak D. and K. Macedulska. 2018. The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politic of contemporary North American literary memoir by women. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM;
2023. “Chapter 11 – Beyond Historiographic Ethnofiction: Interfaces of Ethnicity/Race and History in Recent Canadian Diasporic Life Writing.” Land Deep in Time. Canadian Historiographic Ethnofiction. Eds. W. Suchacka and H. Lutz. Passages – Transitions – Intersections, Vol. 11. V&R unipress. 205-223;
2024. „Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier on Gardens and Cats: Memoirs of Loss and Sustenance.” Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. LXXII.11. Special issue. 97-108.

A selection of MA topics supervised:

“Hybridity, feminism, and trauma in Latino-Canadian and South Asian Canadian prose.”
“Environmental advocacy of contemporary Indigenous North American literature.”
“Tracing Chinese myths in modern Chinese-Canadian novels.”
“Kunstlerroman patterns and motives in selected life writing texts by Canadian neuroatypical authors.”
“How far can we go? Creating possible futures: Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction.”
“Expressing queer experience in Canadian poetry.”
“Canadian magic realist prose of the first decades of the 21st century: themes, styles and structures.”
“Between story and history: manipulating the narrative voice in contemporary Canadian historical novel.”
“Constructions of the maternal space in works by lesbian writers in Canada.”
“Contemporary Native and settler gothic fiction in Canada: A selective comparative study.”
“Mountaineering in Canadian life-writing: Perspectives on climbing, risk and adventure.”“A complicated kind of grief. ‘New wave’ grieving in 21st century Canadian women’s memoir and novel.”

Linguistics

prof. UAM dr hab. Anna Balas

Office: Room 217
E-mail

My research interests include phonetics and phonology, second and third language acquisition of speech, non-native speech perception and production, with special emphasis on phonetic cross-linguistic similarity and multilingualism. I explore how sound systems interact, and how languages are acquired and processed in the multilingual mind.

I can supervise MA theses:

investigating the perception and/or production of non-native sounds or prosody
- using a range of methodologies – such as behavioral tests, training paradigms, gamification, audio-visual experiments, EEG, etc.;
- employing various stimuli, from naturally produced ones, synthesized data, or generated by AI;
language awareness
research-based language policy
related to interdisciplinary topics spanning linguistics, psychology, language education and neuroscience

My current research projects:

multilingual speech perception among listeners with L1 Ukrainian, L2 English and L3 Polish funded by the National Science Center, Poland
ID-UB International Research Team, where researchers from the AMU and the University of North Carolina Wilmington cooperate to examine methodological issues in non-native speech perception research.

Some of the topics I supervised:

The effects of High Variability Phonetic Training on the perception of English TRAP and STRUT vowels by Polish listeners, Perception of Polish fricatives and affricates by native speakers of English, The pronunciation of rhotics by Polish speakers of English living in Scotland [external link], The production of English interdental fricatives by French and Spanish speakers of English [external link], Teaching English pronunciation to beginners: the state of the art and effective teaching strategies, The influence of L2-English on L3-German in the production of German /r/ allophones by Polish speakers [external link], The influence of anglicisms on the perception of /æ/ by Polish learners of English, Vowels in loanwords.

prof. UAM dr hab. Anna Ewert

Office: Room 260

My research interests revolve around second language acquisition, bilingualism and bilingual education. I am particularly interested in how bilinguals represent knowledge and how they process the two languages. I am also interested in bilingual literacy and language acquisition in bilingual educational contexts.

I can supervise MA theses in the following areas:

second language acquisition,
bilingualism,
language teaching (mutually agreed topics).

My recent publication:

Kishchak, V., Ewert, A., Halczak, P., Kleka, P., & Szczerbiński, M. 2024. RAN and two languages: a meta-analysis of the RAN-reading relationship in bilingual children. Reading & Writing 37: 1235–1265. DOI: [external link]

My recent projects:

TEAM [external link to YouTube]
TEAM [external link to the project’s website]
MABEL [external link]

A selection of MA theses I have recently supervised:

Yanhong Jin: “Abstract emotional language embodiment in L1 Chinese and L2 English: A valence-space association study in a web-based vertical paradigm” (Dean’s award for outstanding MA thesis in linguistics, 2024).
Polina Andrushko: “Categorization of body parts by monolinguals and bilinguals”.
Natalia Półrul: “First language object naming by Polish-English bilinguals”.
Katarzyna Gatkowska: “Linear tendencies in bilingual English-Polish and Polish-English repetitions and translations in response to structural priming”.
Adrianna Chmielnicka: “Differences between translators and bilinguals in pseudoword learning”.

If you are interested in writing your MA thesis with me, contact me via email.

prof. UAM dr hab. Kamil Kaźmierski

Office: Room 340

My research interests revolve around using quantitative phonetic evidence for phonological and sociolinguistic patterns. I am interested in how the variation found in speech (including accents of English) is a result of cognitive categories. I have also been involved in research on Second (and Third) Language Acquisition and Evolutionary Linguistics.

I can supervise MA theses:

Experimental acoustic phonetics
Corpus phonetics
Sociophonetics

Some of my publications:

Kaźmierski, K. 2025. “The role of informativity and frequency in shaping word durations in English and in Polish”. Speech Communication 171, 1-9. DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2025.103239
Hejná, M, Kaźmierski, K, Guo, W. 2021. “Even Americans pre-aspirate”. English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English 42(2). DOI: 10.1075/eww.00065.hej
Kaźmierski, K. 2020. “Prevocalic t-glottaling across word boundaries in Midland American English.” Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 11(1): 13, 1-23. DOI: 10.5334/labphon.271

A selection of MA and topics I have recently supervised:

Dziyana Sabaleuskaya: “Ejectives in American English: Corpus-based research”
Klara Ertav: “The effect of lexical diversity on filler particle frequency in bilingual speech”
Przemysław Kabziński: “The study of selected marine mammals' vocalizations: an argument for NeoDarwinian approach to evolutionary linguistics”
Rafia Canyurt: “Evaluating automatic speech recognition performance on non-native accents of English”

If you are interested in writing your MA thesis with me, contact me via email.

prof. UAM dr hab. Hanna Rutkowska

Office: Room 160

My research interests

I have conducted research on linguistic variety and change, in both distant and more recent times, from sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives. In other words, I have investigated the interrelation between variation in language and the historical, social, cultural and situational context in which it is embedded. I am particularly interested in different aspects of standardization, language contact, code-switching, lexical-semantic change, visual pragmatics, multimodality, stylistics, discourse analysis, orthography and typography. With me, you can write an MA thesis on a topic of your choice in any of the above-mentioned research areas.

Some of my publications:

Condorelli, M. and H. Rutkowska (eds.), 2023. The Cambridge handbook of historical orthography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; doi.org/10.1017/9781108766463.
Rutkowska, H. 2020. “Visual pragmatics of an early modern book: Printers’ paratextual choices in the editions of The School of Vertue”, in: C. Tagg and M. Evans (eds.), Message and medium. Berlin: De Gruyter, 199–231; doi.org/10.1515/9783110670837-015.
Rutkowska, H. and P. Rössler. 2012. “Orthographic variables”, in: J. M. Hernández-Campoy and J. C. Conde-Silvestre (eds.), The Handbook of historical sociolinguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 221–244; doi.org/10.1002/9781118257227.ch12.

Selected titles of MA theses which I have supervised:

“Researching medieval English scripts: between palaeography and machine learning”
“The features and functions of Spanglish in selected American songs”
“Polish-English code-switching on social media platforms: a sociolinguistic study”
“Lexical-semantic change in English of the Victorian era on the basis of Manchester Evening News”
“Latin loanwords in Early Modern English: a case study of two books by John Milton”
“Multimodal genres on Facebook: a case study”

You are welcome to contact me by email if you are interested in writing your MA thesis under my supervision.

prof. UAM dr hab. Bartosz Wiland

Office: Room 252
E-mail

Prospective MA students:

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:

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

prof. UAM dr hab. Magdalena Wrembel

Office: Room 189
E-mail

My research interests revolve around bilingualism and multilingualism, third language acquisition, phonetics and phonology, and language awareness.

I can supervise MA theses related to such research topics as:

multilingualism, multilingual advantage
cross-linguistic influence in L2/L3 acquisition
foreign accent ratings studies, accent mimicry
perception and production of selected phonetic features in L2 and L3 acquisition
phonological awareness of L2/L3 learners
cognitive and affective factors in L2 and L3 acquisition

My recent (selected) publications:

Wrembel, M. (2023). Exploring the acquisition of L3 phonology: Challenges, new insights, and future directions. In: Jennifer Cabrelli, Adel Chaouch-Orozco, Jorge González Alonso, Sergio M. Pereira Soares, Eloi Puig-Mayenco and Jason Rothman (Eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition and Processing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 115-141.
Gut, U. and Wrembel, M. (2024). Comparing bilingual and trilingual phonetics and phonology, In: Amenguel, M. (ed.). Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 631-652. ISBN: 9781009098601
Wrembel, M., Gut, U., Kopečková, R., & Balas, A. (2022). The relationship between the perception and production of L2 and L3 rhotics in young multilinguals; an exploratory cross-linguistic study. International Journal of Multilingualism, 21(1), 92–111.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, K., Wrembel, M. (2024). A revised Natural Growth Theory of Acquisition: Evidence from L3 phonology. In: Babatsouli, E. (ed.). Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity. John Benjamins. pp. 426–449.

A selection of MA thesis supervised:

Kujawa Aleksandra: “The role of individual differences in multilingual learners from the Polish educational perspective”
Nowak Ilona: “The use of humour in multilingual contexts: Polish viewers’ preferences for audiovisual translation strategies”