Position/Status
Senior 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
Profile
Blanka works at the intersections of literature, the arts, creative writing, education, philosophy, and politics. She is especially interested in the politics of and creativities in writing for, by, and about the young, and in the legacies of colonialism, including postcolonial terror, together with global communities and childhoods, and experiences of migration, social exclusion, and split belonging, as well as postcolonial intersectionality. She is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2015), Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2020), and Reading Across Worlds: Postcolonial Intersectionality in Contemporary Children’s Literature (forthcoming in 2025); she has also co-edited a special issue of International Research in Children’s Literature on Children’s Engagement with the Political Process (EUP 2021). Her two ongoing research projects that are next in line for special attention focus on the restorative and transformative force of creativities in children’s literature as trauma testimony, resilience mechanism, and socio-political engagement, and on reconceptualisation of thinking about good readers, writers, and critics in the contexts of literary critical education and prizing cultures.
Blanka has been contributing to teaching at all levels within the Faculty since 2016. She taught courses in critical approaches to literature, creative writing, and the arts at various UK and overseas universities before taking up a permanent post in the Faculty in 2019.
Academic Area/Links
- Arts and Creativities
- Centre for Research in Children’s Literature
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)
- Post-Terror, Post-Contagion: Engaging the Creativities of Writing For, By, and About the Young
- Imagining the Country and the City in Children’s Literature
- ‘We’re Going on a History Hunt’: Reading and Writing the Lived Childhoods of Antiquity
Teaching
- Postgraduate
- MPhil (Arts, Creativity and Education; Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature; Knowledge, Power and Politics)
- PGCE-M, MEd (Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature)
- PhD Supervisor and Advisor
- Undergraduate
- Education, English, Drama and the Arts
Principal and Recent Publications
Books/Collections
Grzegorczyk, B. Reading Across Worlds: Postcolonial Intersectionality in Contemporary Children’s Literature (Routledge, forthcoming in 2025).
Grzegorczyk, B. & F. Mendlesohn. (2021). Eds. Children’s Engagement with the Political Process. Special issue of International Research in Children’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 14(1).
Grzegorczyk, B. (2020). Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge.
Grzegorczyk, B. (2015). Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge.
Book Chapters/Articles
Grzegorczyk, B. ‘Postcoloniality and Globalisation’ In The Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English, eds. Eugene Giddens, Zoe Jaques, and Louise Joy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2025).
Grzegorczyk, B. (2023). ‘A Taste for the Secret: Tracing Secretive Families in Malorie Blackman’s Fiction.’ In Family in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, eds. Eleanor Spencer, Jade Dillon Craig, 171–182.
Grzegorczyk, B. (2021). ‘ “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, 147–161.
Grzegorczyk, B. (2021). ‘Reading for Resilience: Postcolonial Aesthetics in the Post-9/11 British Children’s Novel.’ In Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction, eds. Laura Lojo-Rodríguez, Jorge Sacido-Romero, and Noemí Pereira-Ares, Leiden: Brill, 238–252.
Grzegorczyk, B. (2020). ‘Girls, Boys, Bombs, Toys: Terror and Play in Contemporary Children’s Fiction.’ In Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children’s Literature, eds. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Barbara Kalla. New York: Routledge, 93–104.
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.