New professor 2026 at the Faculty of Languages

As a literary historian, I demonstrate how texts are both shaped by their original context and reflect a historical moment in a unique and distinctive way. My research focuses on English-language culture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period characterised by extensive social, political and technological transformations. Within this field of research, I have been active in three main areas. Firstly, I have studied the Polish-born author Joseph Conrad, whose writing was shaped by popular culture, in particular advertising, visual entertainment culture, mass tourism and periodicals. Secondly, studies of British magazines and daily newspapers have led to the discovery of a previously unknown archive relating to investigative journalism focusing on vagrancy, migration and prison life in marginalised social environments. In addition, I have investigated how colonial Rhodesia has been portrayed in British literature, film and drama, with the aim of demonstrating its disproportionately large influence on the general perception of the British Empire. Using text analysis, digital tools and multimedia methods, I have thus deepened my understanding of the emergence of literary modernism, of journalism, and of the cultural consequences of British imperialism.