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Blanka Grzegorczyk

Position/Status

Teaching Associate / Affiliated Lecturer

E-mail Address

bg375@cam.ac.uk

Qualifications

  • PhD in Literary Studies
  • MA in English Studies
  • BA in English Studies

Membership of Professional Bodies/Associations

  • Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy
  • British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies
  • International Research Society for Children’s Literature

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Profile

Blanka is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2015) and Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (Routledge, forthcoming in June 2020). Her research interests are in the intersections of literature, the arts, and theory, with a specific focus on the politics of and creativities in writing for and about the young, and on the legacies of colonialism, including postcolonial terror, together with global communities and childhoods, and experiences of migration, social exclusion, and split belonging. Two of her most recent research projects focus on the restorative and transformative force of creativities in children’s literature as trauma testimony, resilience mechanism, and socio-political engagement. She is also currently co-editing a special issue of International Research in Children’s Literature dedicated to children’s engagement with the political process and working on a monograph examining representations of the country and the city in children’s literature from the Golden Age to the present.

Blanka taught courses in critical approaches to literature and the arts at various UK and overseas universities before taking up a permanent post back in the Faculty of Education in 2019.

Academic Area/Links

  • Arts and Creativities
  • Centre for Research in Children’s Literature

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Research Topics

  • post and de-colonial approaches to knowledges, practices and collections
  • literary and cultural theory
  • social justice, the arts, literature and education
  • children’s and young adult literature and culture
  • creativity, play, and child authorship
  • global childhoods, conflict and peacebuilding
  • twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone literatures
  • colonial, postcolonial and ‘wars around terror’ writing in English

Prospective PhD Applications

Blanka welcomes applications from graduate students interested in working on any topics broadly relating to her research interests.

Current Research Project(s)

  • Imagining the Country and the City in Children’s Literature
  • Playing for Peace: Engaging the Creativities of Post-9/11 Children’s Literature
  • ‘We’re Going on a History Hunt’: Reading and Writing the Lived Childhoods of Antiquity

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Teaching

  • Postgraduate
    • MPhil (Arts, Creativity and Education; Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature; Research Methods Strand)
    • PGCE-M, MEd (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature)
    • PhD Supervisor and Advisor
  • Undergraduate
    • Education, English, Drama and the Arts

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Principal and Recent Publications

Books/Collections

Grzegorczyk, B. & F. Mendlesohn. Eds. Children’s Engagement with the Political Process. Special issue of International Research in Children’s Literature (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in February 2021)

Grzegorczyk, B. Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (Routledge, forthcoming in June 2020)

Grzegorczyk, B. (2015). Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge.

Book Chapters/Articles

Grzegorczyk, B. ‘War, Conflict and Displacement.’ In History of Children’s Literature in English, 1830-1914, eds. Eugene Giddens, Zoe Jaques, and Louise Joy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2022)

Grzegorczyk, B. ‘ “Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall”: The Mediating Child and the Ethics of Cohabitation.’ In Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film, eds. Zoe Jaques and Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming in February 2021)

Grzegorczyk, B. ‘Girls, Boys, Bombs, Toys: Terror and Play in Contemporary Children’s Fiction.’ In Encounters of the Playful Kind: Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships, eds. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Barbara Kalla (Routledge, forthcoming in 2020)

Grzegorczyk, B. ‘Reading for Resilience: Postcolonial Aesthetics in the Post-9/11 British Children’s Novel.’ In The Postcolonial Adolescent in Contemporary British Literature, eds. Laura Lojo-Rodríguez, Jorge Sacido-Romero, and Noemí Pereira-Ares (Brill’s Youth in a Globalizing World, forthcoming in 2020)

Grzegorczyk, B. (2018). ‘Radical Children, Radical Fictions: Terror and Extremism in Sam Mills’s Blackout and Malorie Blackman’s Noble Conflict.’ Neohelicon 45(2), 575-586.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2018). ‘A Trojan Horse of a Different Colour: Counter-Terrorism and Islamophobia in Alan Gibbons’s An Act of Love and Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy.’ Critical Studies on Terrorism 11(1), 26-44.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2013). ‘The Specter of Authenticity: Discourses of (Post)Colonialism in the African novels of Nancy Farmer.’ Academic Journal of Modern Philology 2, 19-25.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2012). ‘Rewriting Colonial Histories in Contemporary British Writing for the Young: From Below and Above.’ Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 50(3), 34-46.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2011). ‘ “To Be Made Perfect”: Transformed World Orders in Gloria Whelan’s Fruitlands and Lois Lowry’s Giver Trilogy.’ Anglica Wratislaviensia 49, 29-36.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2010). ‘ “All I can be is who I am”: Representing Subjectivity in Terry Pratchett’s Nation.’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35(2), 112-130.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2009). ‘At Home with Jane Austen: Imagining the Colonial Connection in Mansfield Park.’ Styles of Communication 1(1), 65-75.

Grzegorczyk, B. (2008). ‘ “Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure”: On Moral Imagination in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.’ Hither Shore 5, 93-105.

Blanka Grzegorczyk

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