COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Klaudia Cierluk comes from Pyrzyce, a small town in western Poland. She holds a BA in English Studies from the Humboldt University of Berlin and an MA in Comparative Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam, where she wrote her thesis on the intersection of affect theory and Witold Gombrowicz’s concept of form. Her Ph.D. project aims to examine modern and contemporary Polish literature as world literature by exploring the ways in which – through migration, translation, and itineraries – Polish and Latin American cultures and literary scenes have become entangled, developed ties, and impacted each other. She wishes to obtain a comprehensive sense of how Polishness has been deconstructed in Latin America in the past century and what hybrid forms of expression arose as a result of this phenomenon. Her further academic interests include ecofeminism, trauma studies, forms of short fiction, as well as themes of mental illness in literature. She co-edits Berlin Quarterly, an English-language literary magazine, and is a passionate writer and translator (working from English, German and Spanish to Polish and from Polish to English). Her works have appeared in LCB diplomatique, Berlin Quarterly and biBLioteka, to name a few.