Benjamin Paloff (Chair/Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, U-M; Professor, Comparative Literature, U-M) was recently featured in the first episode of a new mini-series focusing on Polish and Ukrainian drama and playwrights. As part of the broader “Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature” series, it is sponsored by Polish Cultural Institute New York and hosted by David A. Goldfarb.
Paloff’s conversation with Goldfarb explores three plays structured around the marriage plot, written by Aleksander Fredro (1793-1876), Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907), and Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927). They discuss Fredro’s Maidens’ Vows: Or the Magnetism of the Heart, Wyspiański’s The Wedding, and Przybyszewski’s Snow.
Paloff’s most recent books are Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); vs Computer, his third collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. He has translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota Masłowska, Marek Bieńczyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, Stanford Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.
Polish Cultural Institute New York, established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission to the United States serving under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland. The mission of the Polish Cultural Institute New York is to share Polish heritage, history and art with American audiences, and to promote Poland’s contributions to the success of world culture.
