PROFIL PRACOWNIKA: Krzysztof Majer
dr Krzysztof Majer
e-mail: krzysztof.majer@uni.lodz.pl
SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES
POSITION DESCRIPTION
Orcid/PBN profile
0000-0001-9660-1465
Education
PhD thesis: The Picaro Messiah and the Unworthy Scribe: A Pattern of Obsession in Mordecai Richler’s Later Fiction (2008, supervisor: prof. Krzysztof Andrzejczak)
MA thesis: The Antagonist in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy (2003, supervisor: prof. Krzysztof Andrzejczak)
Awards for academic achievements
Scholarship for young researchers (University of Łódź, 2011)
Thesis/dissertation supervision
Over 30 MA and 40 BA theses on US American and Canadian literature and culture, including the work of authors such as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Rawi Hage, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, Hugh MacLennan, Raymond Carver, Herman Melville, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Abraham Cahan, Sarah Ruhl, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, William S. Burroughs or Alan Moore.
Other (grants, organizational activity)
Dr. Majer has been the head of several international conferences, including the 8th Congress of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies – Canadian (Re)Visions: Futures, Changes, Revolutions / « Les (Re)Visions canadiennes: Projections, Changements, Révolutions » (2019; with Dr. Justyna Fruzińska and Dr. Magdalena Marczuk-Karbownik), Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes (2014; with Dr. Justyna Fruzińska and Prof. Norman Ravvin), Whales & Veils: Obsessions in Melville and Hawthorne (2022; with Dr. Justyna Fruzińska and Karolina Kordala, via Zoom) or Machines / Ravines: Negotiating the (Technological) Sublime (2017; with Mark Tardi, MFA). The keynote speakers for these events were outstanding scholars such as David Nye (University of Southern Denmark), Sherry Simon (Concordia University, Montreal), Aritha van Herk (University of Calgary, Alberta), Giorgio Mariani (“Sapienza” University of Rome) and Goldie Morgentaler (University of Lethbridge, Alberta), as well as Canadian writers such as Bill Gaston, Régine Robin and John Gould.
Since 2009, dr Majer has supervised the United Students Society, an extracurricular reading group under the auspices of the Department of North American Literature and Culture. Meetings are held 2-3 times in a semester and are devoted to North American literature and culture – often to new and non-canonical works. In the past, the group has engaged with the work of, among others, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, H. P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy, William Gibson, or Joyce Carol Oates; we have also discussed feature films by illustrious directors (e.g. Sam Mendes, David Cronenberg, the Coen brothers or Jim Jarmusch), as well as seminal documentaries (e.g. Blue-Eyed, Devil’s Playground or I Am Not Your Negro) and comic books (e.g. Sin City, 100 Bullets, Blacksad).
The meetings are hosted by lecturers, doctoral students and excelling MA or BA students. In addition, we try to engage visiting scholars in the Society’s activities: over the years, our meetings have been hosted by Prof. Norman Ravvin (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada), Prof. Pirjo Ahokas (University of Turku, Finland), Dr. Mirjam Horn (University of Giessen, Germany), Dr. Alexander Scherr (University of Giessen, Germany) and Dr. Murat Erdem (University of Izmir, Turkey).
The Society is also the organizer of an annual student conference devoted to North American literature and culture, usually headed by dr Krzysztof Majer or dr Justyna Fruzińska. So far, ten such events have been held, under the following titles: Images of Conflict (2010), The Body (2012), Transformations / Metamorphoses: The Notion of Change (2013), Music in Literature / Literature in Music: North American Intermedial Exchanges (2014), Unum? Individualism and Community (2016), Pets & Beasts: Animals (2017), Questions of Travel: Journeys (2018), All Lives Matter? Tokenism, Universalization and Containment (2019), Dialectics of Popular Culture (2020, via Zoom), Past / Present: Temporal Currents in North American Literature and Culture (2021, via Zoom), Deadly Calculations: Technology and Violence in North American Literature and Culture (2023). Over the years, keynote lectures have been delivered by excellent scholars such as Professor Paweł Frelik (American Studies Center, University of Warsaw), Professor William Glass (American Studies Center, University of Warsaw), Dr. David Schauffler (University of Silesia, Katowice), Dr. Alexander Scherr (University of Giessen), Dr. Zuzanna Szatanik (University of Silesia in Katowice), Dr. Justyna Stępień (then University of Szczecin), Dr. Aleksandra Musiał (University of Silesia in Katowice), Dr. Marek Wojtaszek (University of Łódź) or Professor Richard Profozich (University of Łódź).
For more information, please visit USS’s Facebook website:
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Dr. Krzysztof Majer specializes in contemporary North American fiction, including Canadian writing. Among his scholarly interests are: intermediality (especially the representation of musical forms in fiction), diasporic cultures in Canada (particularly the Jewish and the Arab diaspora), as well as translation, adaptation, and parody. He is the editor of the world’s first monograph on the fiction of the Lebanese-Canadian writer Rawi Hage, Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage (Brill, 2019), as well as the co-editor of Kanade, di Goldene Medine? Perspectives on Canadian-Jewish Literature and Culture / Perspectives sur la littérature et la culture juives canadiennes (Brill, 2018; with Justyna Fruzińska, Józef Kwaterko and Norman Ravvin) and Tools of Their Tools. Communications Technologies and American Cultural Practice (CSP, 2009; with Grzegorz Kość). He has also published on Mordecai Richler (including a contribution to the Richler issue of Canadian Literature, University of British Columbia, 2010), Steven Millhauser, Patrick deWitt, Jack Kerouac, Mark Anthony Jarman, Thomas Bernhard, Vladimir Nabokov as well as on the films of the Coen Brothers. He has published interviews with Canadian writers (e.g. Bill Gaston, Rawi Hage or Sherry Simon) and theatre director Nicole Schneiderbauer. He is a member of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies (PACS) and the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). Since 2014, he has collaborated with the journal Canadian Literature as reviewer of scholarly and literary publications. In 2021 he began serving as the associate editor at Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture.
Dr. Majer was a visiting scholar, among others, at the Institute of Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University, Montreal (2011), the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw (2015), the University of Silesia in Sosnowiec (2019), the Adam Mickiewicz University (2021) or the State University of Applied Sciences, Konin (2014, 2017, 2020). He has also participated in several teaching exchanges as part of the Erasmus program, e.g. at universities in Lisbon, Antwerp, Szeged, Turku, Izmir, and Giessen. Dr. Majer is a member of the advisory board for the Corona Fictions project, conducted at the University of Graz, Austria.
Krzysztof Majer also works as a translator of literature. He is a member of the Polish Literary Translators’ Association (PLTA); in 2023 he began serving as editor at “Literatura na Świecie”. Earlier he was twice a recipient of the journal’s awards: for the translation of Allen Ginsberg’s Letters (2015) and Michael Herr’s Dispatches (2017). For the latter he was also nominated to the “Gdynia” Literary Prize and the Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński Translation Work Award. In 2023 he was nominated again to both of these awards for his translation of David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress; that same year he was also nominated to the Energia Kultury award for his translation of Denis Johnson's volume of short stories, The Largesse of the Sea-Maiden. In 2016 his English renditions of selected stories from Andrzej Stasiuk’s collection Kucając [Squatting Down] won him the 2nd Prize in the John Dryden Translation Contest, organized by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the British Comparative Literature Association; in 2019 in the same contest he received honorable mention for his translation of excerpts from Andrzej Muszyński’s novel Podkrzywdzie [Harm’s Den]. In 2015 he was awarded a three-week residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre in Canada, where he stayed with writers Rawi Hage and Madeleine Thien. He has also translated, among others, John Cheever's A Vision of the World (Czarne, 2023), Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno ([in:] Nowele i opowiadania; P.I.W. 2020), Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives and Paradise (Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2022, 2023), Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s correspondence (two volumes, Czarne, 2012), Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (W.A.B., 2020), Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor (Czarne, 2016), Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey (Czarne, 2020), Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (Czarne, 2021). Together with Kaja Gucio he has translated short fiction by Bill Gaston (Bogowie pokazują klaty, Marginesy, 2019) and Deborah Eisenberg (My Duck Is Your Duck, Wydawnictwo Cyranka, 2022). He has also translated short prose or excerpts (e.g. Steven Millhauser, Niall Griffiths, D. J. Enright or Stephen King,) as well as literary theory and criticism (e.g. Chinua Achebe, Stuart Hall, Arthur Machen) in journals such as Literatura na Świecie and Art Inquiry. He was the guest editor of the Canada-themed issue of Literatura na Świecie (3-4/2017 – 548-549), for which he also translated works by Rawi Hage, M. A. Jarman, Madeleine Thien and John Gould. For the research purposes of Goldie Morgentaler (University of Lethbridge, Alberta), he has translated into English some hundred Polish letters exchanged by writers Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson. He has conducted translation workshops, among others at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2017, 2020), the University of Wrocław (2017), the University of Silesia (Sosnowiec, 2022) and the Łódź-based Dom Literatury.
For more on dr Majer’s translation activities, please visit his PLTA profile: http://stl.org.pl/profil/krzysztof-majer/