Notes on Contributors
Anton Belenetskyi
is a doctoral student at the Jagiellonian University Doctoral School in the Humanities in Kraków, Poland, where he is working on a Ph.D. thesis concerning uncertainty as the principal experience of the Anthropocene as represented in 21st-century U.S. and Canadian literature. His main academic interests lie in the intersection of ecocriticism, feminist new materialisms, and broadly understood Anthropocene studies. Outside the world of academia and literature, he prefers to spend his free time rearing (and being reared by) his companion species of choice − common houseplants.
Jan Beneš
is Assistant Professor at the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, where he teaches survey courses in American and British literature. He received his M.A. from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His research interests revolve around African American literature, culture, and history, and range from Black aviation and aviators of the Harlem Renaissance era to Black environmental literature. He is the co-editor of an edited monograph entitled Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literatures with Lexington Books.
Šárka Bubíková
is Associate Professor at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her research interests include contemporary American crime fiction, Anglophone children’s literature, American ethnic writing and the ethnic Bildungsroman. Apart from numerous articles, she co-authored with Olga Roebuck The Place It Was Done: Location and Community in Contemporary American and British Crime Fiction (2023, McFarland) and co-edited Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination (2021). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal American and British Studies Annual published by the University of Pardubice. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Amherst College, Amherst, MA, and a visiting researcher at UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA. She also writes fiction.
Izabela Curyłło-Klag
teaches in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her research interests include the modern British and Irish novel, utopian/dystopian fiction, and the intersections between literature, history and culture. She has published numerous articles on avant-garde and
Tereza Dědinová
is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, where she teaches theory and history of fantastic literature and Czech literature. She has written a monograph (2015) and edited three titles focusing on various aspects of speculative fiction. She has published articles devoted to the fantastic from the cognitive and ecocritical perspective, the representation of the actual world in fantasy, and Czech speculative fiction. Her most recent projects involve co-edited volumes Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction: Narrating the Future (2021) and Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media (2022).
Aleksandra Kamińska
(Ph.D.) is an assistant lecturer in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her academic interests include contemporary British drama, ecocriticism and translation theory. She is also a freelance translator and editor of literary fiction. She has edited, among others, Joanna Bator’s Ucieczka niedźwiedzicy (2022).
Bożena Kucała
is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, where she teaches nineteenth-century and contemporary English literature. Her research interests focus on contemporary British fiction, especially the historical novel and neo-Victorian fiction. She is the author of Of What Is Passing: Present-Tense Narration in the Contemporary Historical Novel (2023), Intertextual Dialogue with the Victorian Past in the Contemporary Novel (2012) and co-editor of the book series “Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English.”
Beata Piątek
is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in
Olga Roebuck
(Ph.D., M.Litt.) is an assistant professor at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. She specializes in cultural identities in contemporary crime fiction and other popular genres. She co-edited several volumes, most recently Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination and co-authored the book The Place It Was Done. She is a keen walker and swimmer.
Nataša Tučev
is Associate Professor at the University of Niš, Serbia, Faculty of Philosophy, English Department, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on English Modernism, Twentieth Century Anglophone Literature, Literary Theory and Literary Translation. She has published the following books to date: An Introduction to the Modernist Novel (2021), The Secret Sharers: Joseph Conrad’s Literary Characters (2017) and Inner Emigre: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics (2011). Her academic interests include Modernism, Modernist Novel and Joseph Conrad Studies. She is a member of the Association of Literary Translators of Serbia. Her most notable literary translations include Byron’s Childe Harold and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Ladislav Vít
received his Ph.D. from Charles University, Prague, and now works at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. His research interests lie with British interwar writing, literary topography, travel writing and the poetics of place. His major focus is on spatial responsiveness from the perspective of cultural and humanistic geography. His publications include “Feet on the Ground: Landscape in Auden’s Late Poetry” (2014), “Poetry and Place in Auden’s Letters from Iceland” (2016), “Landscape as a Benchmark: Poetics of Place as a Critical Tool in W. H. Auden’s Prose” (2018), “Between Blinding and Enlightening: On Auden, Myth and Knowledge” (2022) and “The Ethics of Going North: Moral Geography in Louis MacNeice and Wystan Hugh Auden’s Letters from Iceland” (2023). In 2021 Routledge published his The Landscapes of W. H. Auden’s
Sylwia Janina Wojciechowska
is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature Studies at Ignatianum University in Cracow, Poland. She holds a Polish degree in Classical Philology and a German degree in English and Italian Philology. She is the author of Re(Visions) of the Pastoral in Selected British and American post-Romantic Fiction (2017) and Nost/algia as a Mode of Reflection in the Autobiographical Narratives of Joseph Conrad and Henry James (2023). As a Conradian scholar, she has been a Board Member of the Polish Joseph Conrad Society and member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her latest contribution is contained in the Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad (2024).