Blanka Grzegorczyk

Blanka works at the intersections of literature, the arts, creative writing, education, philosophy, and politics. She is especially interested in the politics of and creativities in writing for, by, and about the young, and in the legacies of colonialism, including postcolonial terror, together with global communities and childhoods, and experiences of migration, social exclusion, and split belonging, as well as postcolonial intersectionality. She is the author of Discourses of Postcolonialism in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2015), Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature (2020), and Reading Across Worlds: Postcolonial Intersectionality in Contemporary Children’s Literature (forthcoming in 2025); she has also co-edited a special issue of International Research in Children’s Literature on Children’s Engagement with the Political Process (EUP 2021). Her two ongoing research projects that are next in line for special attention focus on the restorative and transformative force of creativities in children’s literature as trauma testimony, resilience mechanism, and socio-political engagement, and on reconceptualisation of thinking about good readers, writers, and critics in the contexts of literary critical education and prizing cultures.

Blanka has been contributing to teaching at all levels within the Faculty since 2016. She taught courses in critical approaches to literature, creative writing, and the arts at various UK and overseas universities before taking up a permanent post in the Faculty in 2019.

Research Topics
post and de-colonial approaches to knowledges, practices and collections
literary and cultural theory
social justice, the arts, literature and education
children’s and young adult literature and culture
creativity, play, and child authorship
global childhoods, conflict and peacebuilding
twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone literatures
colonial, postcolonial and ‘wars around terror’ writing in English