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CULTURAL STUDIES AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE FACULTY


 Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood

 Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. – Yale University
kalinowska-blackwood
Izabela.Kalinowska-Blackwood@stonybrook.edu | 631.632.7461 | 1067 Humanities
    • Russian and Polish literature; culture and film.

I am an Associate Professor of Comparative Slavic studies. My research interests include Polish and Soviet/Russian cinemas, gendered notions of identity, nationalism, colonial and post-colonial studies, Orientalist discourses, as well as Polish and Russian travel to the East.

I received my MA in English Philology from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, where I worked on American postmodern literature. I continued my studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where I spent a year as a graduate student at the Kennedy Institute. My PhD training was in comparative Slavic literature at Yale. In my doctoral and post-doctoral work, I looked at how Poles and Russians, who were themselves perceived as Easterners by the rest of Europe, traveled to the Romantic Orient. In Eastern journeys near and far, to Crimea, the Caucasus and the Holy Land, both Poles and Russians tended to assert their own Europeanness by willingly embracing Western patterns of looking at the Orient. My analyses of literary texts, including travel descriptions, led me to conclude that although prevalent, the temptation to follow in the footsteps of Western travelers was not universal. Following the completion of Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient (U of Rochester Press, 2004), my interests shifted towards Polish and Russian cinemas, where I have examined issues relating to the constructions of gender, national identity, ways of speaking about the past, as well as the interactions and exchanges between the two national cinemas.

My current projects branch out in two directions. I am completing a manuscript on Polish cinema of the 1980s, while, at the same time, continuing my previous preoccupation with Orientalism, this time within the realm of Soviet-era and post-Soviet cinema.