CCPS hosts the Dianne Widzinski Visiting Fellowship, which is intended to extend knowledge of contemporary Polish society and politics and provide Polish scholars with opportunities to conduct and share their research at the University of Michigan. The first group of fellows arrived in Winter 2024. Visit the fellowship page for more information and to apply.
Fall 2025
Elżbieta Durys
Widzinski Visiting Fellow, Fall 2025
Elżbieta Durys is an associate professor of education (Cultural Studies Center) at the University of Warsaw. Her recent research focuses on film and history, remediation of memory in film, contemporary Polish historical cinema, as well as film education. In her work, she stresses gender perspective and critical theories. Durys has written numerous articles on film, co-edited two volumes on American cinema (2006, 2007) and two volumes on gender in culture (2005, 2014), and published three books in Polish—the analysis of John Cassavetes oeuvre (2009), the monograph of American police movies (2013), and Film as a Source of Historical Knowledge (2019). She is a member of the editorial boards of Literatura i Kultura Popularna (since 2018) and Education Research Quarterly (since 2021).
Magdalena Zdrodowska
Widzinski Visiting Fellow, Fall 2025
Magdalena Zdrodowska is an associate professor of media studies and cultural studies at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She works at the intersection of disability studies, deaf studies, history of technology, and film studies. She currently focuses on the relationship between cinema and deafness and approaches deaf-related technologies, deaf spectatorship, and deaf filmmaking as lenses through which to view the history of cinema as both art and technology. She serves as a chair of the Disability Studies in East Europe research platform and as a member of the executive committee of the Society for the History of Technology SHOT. Zdrodowska has translated L. Davies' Enforcing Normalcy into Polish (2022). She is currently working on her third book, Deaf Cinema. Her earlier monographs are Telewizja na pograniczach [Television on the Borderlands] (2013) and Telefon, kino i cyborgi [Telephone, Cinema and Cyborgs] (2021).
