MY TEACHING EXPERIENCEVertical Divider
My teaching experience should be divided in three quite unlike stages. The first stage goes from 1997 to 2006, when I was working in the Institute of Romance Philology, Jagiellonian University, i.e. in a traditional, philological context. I was teaching Portuguese language and literature (19th and 20th c.), together with more general elements of Portuguese culture. Another stage goes from 2006 to approximately 2010-2012, when the main load of teaching activities was located in the curriculum of Mediterranean Studies, realized in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies that later on became the Faculty "Artes Liberales", University of Warsaw. Finally, since 2010, I've been systematically involved in a growing number of PhD programs. Each of these programs has been an occasion not only for simple supervision of the doctoral projects, but also for some original forms of reflection, often beyond the usual conventions of academic paper. These unpublished materials are uploaded on the sub-pages dedicated to the respective events.
Participation in postgraduate seminars and the tasks related to academic advising and supervision of PhD dissertations progressively filled the space previously occupied by my undergraduate classes. Since 2013, I've also engaged into an original program of experimental seminars, developing my own approach to academic production and transmission of knowledge. Some of them were realised at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Warsaw, in the framework of the project "Strategies of introducing and and evaluating transdisciplinary curricula and research projects in universities in context of the reform of higher education in Poland" (POKL.04.01.03-00-002/11, co-financed by the European Social Found – Human Capital, IV, 4.1.3.) The concept of "experimental seminar" reflects a vision of production, as well as transmission of knowledge inside the academic institution. This peculiar modality of reflection has an abundant illustration in the history of the humanities, just to quote such examples as Lacan's and Derrida's seminars or the readings in Paul's letters provided by Giorgio Agamben. |
My participation in PhD programs & seminars
TRADYCJE I NOWE KIERUNKI BADAŃ W HUMANISTYCE (2014-2016).
Coordination: Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa
A collective seminar dedicated to the presentation of different methodological inspirations in the humanities, with special relevance given to literature and criticism.
BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE (2014-...).
Coordination: Jerzy Axer
The main idea of this doctoral program is to offer an opportunity of realizing transdisciplinary projects, situated between humanities and science. Originally, the project was closely related to human/animal studies and focused on introducing this new research field into the Polish academic system. In the meanwhile, the scope of this endeavor became larger, the ideal of liberal education remaining still in the background.
As the project developed beyond the limits of anthrozoology, I could see some space for a deeper involvement, bringing about other items of my experience, including my views on theory of complexity adopted for the study of human and transhuman cultures. Still, falconry as a specific lore and an area of expertise was my first idea for a share I could bring into this project. After all, what could be better illustration of the brink situated "between nature and culture" than this archaic, and yet strikingly contemporary relationship between man and the bird that accompanied him since prehistory without ever becoming fully tame? The topic had been presented during a workshop in Gugny research station (Biebrza Marshes National Park) in June 2015.
SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY (2013-...)
Coordination: Jan Kieniewicz
Official page of the program: http://www.isd.al.uw.edu.pl/searching-en.php
The key concept of this seminar, "identity", is evidently not mine. I'd been only a member of the faculty, perhaps an advocatus diaboli, trying to provide for the intellectual climate. In fact, nothing could be as clearly opposed to my theoretical stance as an intent of "searching for identity", except for the presupposition that identity is, at the present moment, irretrievably lost.
The seminar is designed by Jan Kieniewicz in the first place. Its origin is related to an earlier existence of a "Siberian-Polish Research Group" and other projects of collaboration involving the members of diverse ethnic groups of Siberia. I've been collaborating occasionally with them since 2011; my contributions to Debaty Artes Liberales in 2011 and 2012, translated into Russian, testify of this involvement.
In 2013, the opportunities created in the framework of the ERASMUS AURORA program and the growing number of postgraduate and post-doctoral fellows present at the Faculty "Artes Liberales" made the existence of a regular seminar not only justified, but also urgent. Several Polish PhD students joined it as well, and in fact the public became, as for the local conditions, quite numerous.
My duties as the supervisor of two PhD dissertations and less formalized adviser of yet another two or three students seem to be clear. Yet from a personal perspective, what I find here is a perturbing instance of encounter - or dis-encounter between Eastern and Western minds. Also the clash against the personality of the coordinator himself (and the span of more than one generation that separates us) is often leading me to redefine or specify my stance in a curious kind of intellectual geopolitics. It also involves a very particular optics on Poland as a crossroad of Eastern essentialism and of quite a distinct and non-obvious in this context, Western attitude of constant doubt and examination.
The experience is as much enriching as frustrating. I often doubt if the AURORA participants gain anything with my presence. I rather see myself as a troublesome spirit incarnating a challenge that anybody is neither keen nor perhaps able to undertake. In no other circumstances could I epitomize so completely the ever-changing flux of cultural theory and criticism as I do in contrast to the "other temporality", the kind of insensibility to time that my Eastern counterparts often represent, tempted, as I suppose, by some kind of perennial, stabilized knowledge, rather than by the turbulent flux of incessant examination, producing ever-shifting theories and practices of interpretation. They do not interpret, as it seems to me, they seek for essential truths. Perhaps this is why I'm unable to grasp their humanities as much as they seem to be unable to fathom mine. Yet for sure there is a slipping point of intersection.
During two academic years of my regular participation in this seminar, I've produced several texts. Some of them are synthetic, yet basic presentations of the main coordinates in cultural theory; other are quite intricate, and at the same time very personal essays examining the perspectives of those not so trivial, as I believe, meetings of the mind.
Coordination: Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa
A collective seminar dedicated to the presentation of different methodological inspirations in the humanities, with special relevance given to literature and criticism.
BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE (2014-...).
Coordination: Jerzy Axer
The main idea of this doctoral program is to offer an opportunity of realizing transdisciplinary projects, situated between humanities and science. Originally, the project was closely related to human/animal studies and focused on introducing this new research field into the Polish academic system. In the meanwhile, the scope of this endeavor became larger, the ideal of liberal education remaining still in the background.
As the project developed beyond the limits of anthrozoology, I could see some space for a deeper involvement, bringing about other items of my experience, including my views on theory of complexity adopted for the study of human and transhuman cultures. Still, falconry as a specific lore and an area of expertise was my first idea for a share I could bring into this project. After all, what could be better illustration of the brink situated "between nature and culture" than this archaic, and yet strikingly contemporary relationship between man and the bird that accompanied him since prehistory without ever becoming fully tame? The topic had been presented during a workshop in Gugny research station (Biebrza Marshes National Park) in June 2015.
SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY (2013-...)
Coordination: Jan Kieniewicz
Official page of the program: http://www.isd.al.uw.edu.pl/searching-en.php
The key concept of this seminar, "identity", is evidently not mine. I'd been only a member of the faculty, perhaps an advocatus diaboli, trying to provide for the intellectual climate. In fact, nothing could be as clearly opposed to my theoretical stance as an intent of "searching for identity", except for the presupposition that identity is, at the present moment, irretrievably lost.
The seminar is designed by Jan Kieniewicz in the first place. Its origin is related to an earlier existence of a "Siberian-Polish Research Group" and other projects of collaboration involving the members of diverse ethnic groups of Siberia. I've been collaborating occasionally with them since 2011; my contributions to Debaty Artes Liberales in 2011 and 2012, translated into Russian, testify of this involvement.
In 2013, the opportunities created in the framework of the ERASMUS AURORA program and the growing number of postgraduate and post-doctoral fellows present at the Faculty "Artes Liberales" made the existence of a regular seminar not only justified, but also urgent. Several Polish PhD students joined it as well, and in fact the public became, as for the local conditions, quite numerous.
My duties as the supervisor of two PhD dissertations and less formalized adviser of yet another two or three students seem to be clear. Yet from a personal perspective, what I find here is a perturbing instance of encounter - or dis-encounter between Eastern and Western minds. Also the clash against the personality of the coordinator himself (and the span of more than one generation that separates us) is often leading me to redefine or specify my stance in a curious kind of intellectual geopolitics. It also involves a very particular optics on Poland as a crossroad of Eastern essentialism and of quite a distinct and non-obvious in this context, Western attitude of constant doubt and examination.
The experience is as much enriching as frustrating. I often doubt if the AURORA participants gain anything with my presence. I rather see myself as a troublesome spirit incarnating a challenge that anybody is neither keen nor perhaps able to undertake. In no other circumstances could I epitomize so completely the ever-changing flux of cultural theory and criticism as I do in contrast to the "other temporality", the kind of insensibility to time that my Eastern counterparts often represent, tempted, as I suppose, by some kind of perennial, stabilized knowledge, rather than by the turbulent flux of incessant examination, producing ever-shifting theories and practices of interpretation. They do not interpret, as it seems to me, they seek for essential truths. Perhaps this is why I'm unable to grasp their humanities as much as they seem to be unable to fathom mine. Yet for sure there is a slipping point of intersection.
During two academic years of my regular participation in this seminar, I've produced several texts. Some of them are synthetic, yet basic presentations of the main coordinates in cultural theory; other are quite intricate, and at the same time very personal essays examining the perspectives of those not so trivial, as I believe, meetings of the mind.
"Teaching Eastern students Western humanities? Notes on intellectual mediation in the seminar 'Searching for Identity' at the University of Warsaw", introductory text produced for the seminar given on 8th January 2015.
| teaching_eastern_students_western_humanities.pdf |
"Civilization and performance. Polemics with Jan Kieniewicz", glosses produced between November 2014 and January 2015.
| civilization_and_performance.pdf |
THE TRADITIONS OF MEDITERRANEAN HUMANISM AND THE CHALLENGES OF OUR TIMES
International PhD Program financed by the Foundation for Polish Science (MPD), 2010-2015
Coordination: Jerzy Axer, Jan Miernowski
Official page of the program: www.mpd.ibi.uw.edu.pl
The International PhD program "Traditions of the Mediterranean Humanism", realized under the auspices of the Foundation for Polish science, gathered 13 PhD projects produced by candidates from Poland, Germany, Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine, belonging to quite different fields of the humanities and exploring quite different topics. What they had in common was the search for understanding of such general conceptions as the sense of interdisciplinary research or innovation and originality in humanities.
Since the beginning, my participation had been, in a sense, thwarted. What I had planned as one of the collaborators in the original proposal was a topic concerning the medieval Al-Andalus - its emergence and utmost collapse. Nonetheless it resulted impossible to find a suitable candidate to collaborate with me in this research; lamentably, the topic disappeared from the agenda. It is still so dear to me and so essential for my current project of the Transcultural Humanities, thus bitterly I regret it; it could have created a solid basis for my current development. I just miss the work that hasn't been done and still insist upon the importance of the Andalusian lesson for the contemporary Europe.
I stayed in the program as an academic adviser of the remaining PhD students and utterly the supervisor of the dissertation Negotiating Minor and Canonical: Gilles Deleuze and Harold Bloom on Literary Creation by Katarzyna Chruszczewska. My work in this project oscillated between supervision and original contribution to those general topics: originality, innovation, importance of the humanities. My interventions aimed at the enlargement of the horizons in cultural and intellectual terms, diversifying strategies of reading and thinking in order to break through localized mentalities. I also supervised the edition of the proceedings, Imagine there were no humanities... (Warsaw 2015).
International PhD Program financed by the Foundation for Polish Science (MPD), 2010-2015
Coordination: Jerzy Axer, Jan Miernowski
Official page of the program: www.mpd.ibi.uw.edu.pl
The International PhD program "Traditions of the Mediterranean Humanism", realized under the auspices of the Foundation for Polish science, gathered 13 PhD projects produced by candidates from Poland, Germany, Hungary, Serbia and Ukraine, belonging to quite different fields of the humanities and exploring quite different topics. What they had in common was the search for understanding of such general conceptions as the sense of interdisciplinary research or innovation and originality in humanities.
Since the beginning, my participation had been, in a sense, thwarted. What I had planned as one of the collaborators in the original proposal was a topic concerning the medieval Al-Andalus - its emergence and utmost collapse. Nonetheless it resulted impossible to find a suitable candidate to collaborate with me in this research; lamentably, the topic disappeared from the agenda. It is still so dear to me and so essential for my current project of the Transcultural Humanities, thus bitterly I regret it; it could have created a solid basis for my current development. I just miss the work that hasn't been done and still insist upon the importance of the Andalusian lesson for the contemporary Europe.
I stayed in the program as an academic adviser of the remaining PhD students and utterly the supervisor of the dissertation Negotiating Minor and Canonical: Gilles Deleuze and Harold Bloom on Literary Creation by Katarzyna Chruszczewska. My work in this project oscillated between supervision and original contribution to those general topics: originality, innovation, importance of the humanities. My interventions aimed at the enlargement of the horizons in cultural and intellectual terms, diversifying strategies of reading and thinking in order to break through localized mentalities. I also supervised the edition of the proceedings, Imagine there were no humanities... (Warsaw 2015).
"Future of the Humanities", speech given in the framework of International PhD program "The Traditions of Mediterranean Humanism and the Challenges of Our Times", 2013.
| future_of_the_humanities.pdf |
EXPERIMENTAL SEMINARSThe expression I use may be misleading. What I mean is in fact the realization of a concept that comes from very far behind. What distinguishes my "experimental seminars" among other teaching activities is the return to an idea that a university professor should speak about the things he or she researched directly, principle valid in the German academia a century and more than a century ago. In Poland, I'm afraid, such a requirement may be regarded either as absurd or at least as counter-effective. The normal practice is to transmit a kind of impersonal sum of knowledge, perhaps considered as an "objective" and truly "scientific" vision of the matter being taught. In practice, such a course is based on reading and explication of texts, reconstruction of ideas that don't come from the lecturer himself or herself. It may work efficiently as a way of transmitting certain skills or flows of information, yet such a functional basis of the academic practice makes derivation stand for originality.
Even if I can rarely see that classical paradigm in my own academic context, I cannot avoid the consciousness that a lot of intellectual progress has been done through innovative seminars or cycles of lectures that start from a living research field and become books at the end of the year. If those lessons of masters have disappeared from the current academic practice, they require an urgent reactivation as a live performance of the idea in the state of becoming. This is why I conceived several originally designed courses that first of all serve to create new wholes, taking my previous research as a kind of raw material in need of a higher degree of organization. I believe they are essential as a demonstration of a knowledge-in-progress. |
EROTICISM: A NOTION IN CULTURAL THEORY AND CRITICISM
(spring semester 2016) The main idea of this seminar is to redefine the Agamben's concept of "forma di vita" (originally used to render the singularity of the Franciscan order among other forms of monasticism) in such a way as to consider eroticism as a source of forms of life. READ MORE >>> |
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THE DESERT: SPACE OF ENCOUNTER
(winter semester, 2013/14) Experimental seminar built up around of the notion of the Desert issued from the monotheistic tradition. The Desert represents the void, empty space that is the primary condition of any creative endeavor. As opposed to the city, Desert is free from human constructions; it opens thus the crucial opportunity of an encounter with what is radically non-human: with the divine - and all the monstrosity of the divine, revealed in the temptation of Saint Anthony. The temptation of the Desert as a space of an anti-philosophical eroticism appears in Nietzsche. The opposition of the nomad and the city-dweller is productive in Kafka, and thus in Deleuze and Guattari. For Agata Bielik-Robson, the suspended existence bemidbar, between Egypt and the Promised Land becomes a parable of our time. For myself, the forgotten modality of anachoresis, the crucial "exit" towards the Desert, becomes a warrant of originality, the ever-lasting promise of an absolute beginning. READ MORE>>> FALCONRY: MAN / BIRD RELATIONSHIP (spring semester, 2014) The seminar dedicated to the history of a specific cultural practice: falconry is inscribed in the context of athrozoology (human/animal studies). READ MORE>>> |
INTELLECTUALS AND THE GLOBAL CULTURAL REALITY
(spring semester, 2015) Seminar dedicated to the figure of the intellectual, originally related to the secularizing order of Western modernity. At present, this figure acquires a global importance as the intellectuals become crucial factors of change also in non-Western cultural dynamics. READ MORE>>> As the culminating moment of this seminar, we organised a conference under the same title, which took place on 13th June, 2015. |
