Krystyna Wieszczek is a Horizon Europe Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow (MSCA) at Columbia University and the University of Verona, Italy.
She specializes in 20-century English literature, with particular emphasis on its intersections with censorship and translation history. She is also interested in the collective social impact of reading. Her first monograph, George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions (2025), uncovers the history of Orwell’s reception both in communist Poland and outside, and traces his relationships with Polish exiles.
Her current project, LIFE – LIterature For Empowerment, supported by the European Union, investigates empirical reception with a particular focus on the potential empowering effects of literary reading at the individual level.
Before beginning the Marie Curie Fellowship, she was an Assistant Professor in English Philology at the Ignatianum Academy in Krakow, Poland, and an English lecturer at the University of Bologna, Italy. Prior to that, she had been a Visiting Scholar in English at the University of Milan.
Her publications on Orwell, communist censorship, Polish diaspora and migration, the empirical study of literature, education, and modernist architecture have appeared in England, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, South Korea, and the United States. For more information about her publications, see here. She has also translated a series of children's books from Polish into Spanish.
PhD in English, University of Southampton, UK
MA in Translation Studies, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain
BA in English Philology, PWSZ, Krosno, Poland
Working languages: English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.
