Bożena Shallcross

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Professor
Foster 508
Office Hours: On leave
773.702.7734
Ph.D., Institute for Literary Research, Polish Academy of Science & Letters, Warsaw, 1983.
Teaching at UChicago since 2001
Research Interests: Cultural studies; Polish/Jewish studies (in particular the Holocaust); relationship between literature and visual arts; material culture and thing theory; identity and modes of habitation. Polish literature: 20th and 21st centuries; translation studies.

"As of late, I brought to the fore the material sphere of a radically different historical setting—the Holocaust—in order to establish the precarious ontology of trivial, everyday things in extreme conditions of the genocide."

Biography

My primary research concern has always been the relationship established between a creative subjectivity and the outside world. In this sense, I dealt with various concepts related to the once fundamental division between the seeing subject and the seen sphere, mainly, works of art as represented in literature, visual arts, and a physical world. 

My research evolved from interrogating the late stage of Polish symbolist poetry and its perceptual revisions of Western European visual arts into an exploration of the late modernist destabilization of the poetic subject and art-object divide from the perspective of epiphanic encounters with art.

As of late, I brought to the fore the material sphere of a radically different historical settingthe Holocaustin order to establish the precarious ontology of trivial, everyday things in extreme conditions of the genocide.

Currently, I am working on several major projects such as articles, conferences and monographs; of the latter the most advanced are the book manuscript, tentatively entitled Inscriptions and Intimacy, and an anthology of texts by various authors entitled The Jewish Inn: From Architecture to Phantasm.

Work with Students

I have served on thirty PhD committees (either as the first or the second reader) and twenty MAs. This cooperation has had a very wide scope ranging from theoretical, historical or comparative foci to reassessments of single authors, as well as inter-art transmission and traumatic experiences of genocide.

In my work with undergraduate students, (independent research or BA projects), I consider how to their own ideas and interests and build a foundation for their conceptualization.

I have also mentored several foreign scholars whose post-doctoral work/second book projects engaged artistic responses to the Holocaust, art-historical developments within Polish modernism, concepts of labor and action, and, as of late, issues in poetry translation.   

Affiliated Departments and Centers

The Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies; Chicago Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; Program in Poetry and Poetics; Comparative Literatures Department, resource faculty.

Publications

“The Muselmann and the Necrotopography of a Ghetto,” The Journal of Holocaust Research (formerly Dapim), Dennis Bock and Michael Becker, eds., vol. 34, 2020: 3, 220-240; (ID: 1785089 DOI:10.1080/25785648.2020.1785089).

“Behind the Issue,” Alexa Asher (University of Haifa) interviews Bożena Shallcross about the above article for The Journal of Holocaust Research.

Obligations of the Holocaust poetry researchers tied to the basic goals of poetry.
[Powinności badaczek i badaczy poezji Holocaustu wiążą się z zadaniami poezji w ogóle.]

Anita Jarzyna interviews Professor Bożena Shallcross, annotated interview, Narracje o Zagładzie, 2019: 5, 23-43.

"Between Desire and Inaction: On the Domestic Interiority in Orzeszkowa’a On the Niemen River,” in Another Canon. The 19th Century Polish Literature, English language anthology, Grażyna Borkowska and Lidia Wiśniewska eds. (Muenster, Germany: LIT-Verlag, 2019), refereed, 60-73.

“War and Violence: How to Rescue a Wartime Artifact,” in Cambridge University Press Handbook of Culture Studies, Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber eds., by invitation, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming in 2020), 30.

“Powinności badaczek i badaczy poezji Holokaustu wiążą się z zadaniami poezji w ogóle,” Anita Jarzyna interviews Bożena Shallcross, for Narracje o Zagładzie, 2020:1, 21.

Scandalous Glass House,” in Centering the Periphery: Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital, Natalia Aleksiun, Halina Goldberg, Nancy Sinkoff eds., under review, 20.

“Krasicki cum Kant: Reading The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom,” lead book chapter, in Światowa historia literatury polskiej. Interpretacje, [World History of Polish Literature: Interpretations], bilingual Polish-English anthology, Magdalena Popiel and Tomasz Bilczewski, eds., by invitation, (Kraków: Universitas), forthcoming in 2020, refereed, in press, 42.

Requiem for a Canon? The Peculiar Case of the Trans-Atlantic Canon,” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, & Przemysław Czapliński, et al., eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), refereed, 153-164.

“Materialność i logosfera codzienności,” topical issue New Humanities, Teksty Drugie, 2017: 1, refereed, 334-348.

“Efekt niesprzątniętego pokoju,” in (Nie)przezroczystość normalności. Obrazy ładu, porządku w literaturze polskiej XIX i XX wieku, Hanna Gosk and Bożena Karwowska, eds. (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2014), 244-263.

Previously Taught Courses

  • The Holocaust Object 
  • Cinema and the Holocaust
  • Survival
  • Kieślowski’s French Cinema
  • Kieślowski, The Decalogue
  • Narratives of Assimilation
  • Theories of Vision
  • The Writer as Philosopher: Gombrowicz
  • Bruno Schulz: An Unfinished Modernist Project
  • Word and Image: Reassessing Interdisciplinarity