ZALESKI Marek

Born on 12 October 1952 in Łomża; son of the irrigation engineer Zenon Zaleski and the landscape designer and engineer Maria, née Gędzielewska. He moved to Warsaw as child and was a pupil at the city's Tadeusz Reytan Grammar School No. 6 from 1967, completing his advanced secondary education there in 1971. That year, he began a degree in Polish philology at the University of Warsaw (UW), graduating with a master's degree in 1976. He was awarded a distinction for his thesis on Czesław Miłosz's "treatise" poems. His study appeared in print in the journal "Pamiętnik Literacki" (1977, vol. 3) and marked his debut as a literary scholar. He made his debut as a literary critic in 1974 with a review titled Nowe książki poetyckie (New Works of Poetry) that that appeared in "Nowy Wyraz" (no. 10). The review was divided into three parts: Rekolekcje poetyckie (Poetic Recollections) examined F. Kamecki's Parabola Syzyfa (Sisyphus' Parabola); Wyobraźnia ocalająca (Saving Imagination) H. Hartenberg's Stromy jest czas (Time is steep); and Gigantomania(Megalomania) S. Skoneczny's Żywioły (Elements). He continued to publish numerous texts on contemporary literature in the same periodical to 1977. In 1976, he joined the Doctoral Programme at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN), where he was appointed senior research assistant in 1980 at the Department of Literary Culture. He also published articles and reviews on contemporary literature in periodicals including "Teksty" (1979 and 1981) and "Twórczość" (intermittently between 1979 and 1986). From 1979 to 1983, he was a member of the Young Circle (Koło Młodych) of the Warsaw Branch of the Polish Writers' Union (ZLP). He was awarded a doctoral degree from IBL PAN in 1983 for his dissertation Przygoda drugiej awangardy (The Adventures of the Second Avant-Garde), which was supervised by Prof. Stefan Żółkiewski. He was subsequently appointed lecturer. He literary essays and articles appeared in periodicals published outside the reach of state censorship, including "Arka" (1984-85), "Kultura Niezależna" (1985-86; here using the pseudonym Florian Hryniewiecki), "Zeszyty Literackie" (1985 and 1987), and "Almanach Humanistyczny" (1989). From 1984, he was involved in the activities of the Main Committee of the Olympiad in Polish Literature and Language, an event organized by IBL PAN and the Ministry of National Education. From 1984 to 1989, he participated in the research meetings of the literary criticism section of the Adam Mickiewicz Literary Society. In 1985, he left the Department of Literary Culture for the Department of Contemporary Literature (which was later renamed the Department of Twentieth Century Literature and then in 2005 the Department of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature) at IBL PAN. He was in Paris in 1986 on a fellowship awarded by the Foundation for Supporting Independent Polish Literature and Scholarship, returning the following year as a fellow of the S. Lam Literary History Society. He joined the editorial board of the monthly "Res Publica" (from 1992 "Res Publica Nowa"; quarterly from 2005) in 1986, where he became head of the culture section in 1989. Between 2000 and 2007, he served as deputy editor in chief. His contributions to the periodical between 1992 and 1995 included the cycle Dziennik lektur (Diary of Reading Material), using the cryptonyms M.Z. and MZ for some entries. He visited the USA in 1989 on a US Information Agency fellowship as a member of the "Res Publica" editorial board. During the trip, he gave several lectures, including talks at Amherst College (Massachusetts) and Wesleyan University in Middletown (Connecticut). He joined the Polish Writers' Association (SPP) in 1990 and the Polish PEN Club in 1993. In 1991, together with Andrzej Titkow, he co-created and co-presented the literary television series Świat przedstawiony (The World Depicted), which was broadcast on Polish Television's TVP 2 station. That year, he was a fellow of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. During his stay in the US, he gave several lectures at Emory University in Atlanta (Georgia) and Duke University in Durham (North Carolina). From 1995 to 1997, he was a member of the TVP assessment council at the editorial office of Education Television. He was awarded a habilitation degree from IBL PAN in 1996 for his study Formy pamięci. O przedstawieniu przeszłości w polskiej literaturze współczesnej (Forms of Memory: On representations of the past in contemporary Polish literature). The following year, he was appointed senior lecturer. He received fellowships from the British Academy in London on three occasions (1996, 2004 and 2006). He published articles and reviews in periodicals and newspapers including "Teksty Drugie" (1996 and again intermittently from 2001), "Tygodnik Powszechny" (intermittently from 1997), "Polityka" (1997, 2003, and 2005-08), and "Gazeta Wyborcza" (intermittently from 1998 to 2009). Between 1997 and 2000, he was a member of the jury of the Ludwik Fryde prize, which was awarded by the International Association of Literary Criticism. From 1998 to 2000, he served on the jury of the J. Stwora Fellowship Competition for radio reportage, which was organized by Polish Radio. From 1998 to 2006, he was an expert adviser to the Literary Group of the Villa Decius Association as part of the Cultural Dialogue Forum (which in 2000 was incorporated into the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and then in 2003 into the Polish Book Institute). In 1998, he was appointed to the Scientific Council of IBL PAN, serving as its deputy chair between 2007 and 2010. In 1999, he became a founder member of the Open Republic Association against Antisemitism and Xenophobia. In 2001, he was a fellow of the International Writing Program at Iowa University in the US. In 2005, he started teaching on the Doctoral Programme at IBL PAN. That year, he joined Amnesty International. From 2005 to 2007, and again from 2017 to 2018, he served on the jury of the Nike Literary Prize. Between 2007 and 2013, he held a part-time post at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UW and also joined its Scientific Council. In 2008, he again collaborated as a literary expert with the Polish Book Institute in Krakow. Between 2008 and 2010, he was a member of the Jan Józef Lipski Competition, organized by the Democratic-Social Association and then by the Open Republic Association. In 2009, following the death of Prof. Jan Błoński, he was appointed to the Scientific Council of the team working on Czesław Miłosz's collected works (Dzieła zebrane). He was appointed professor at IBL PAN in 2010. As part of the Miłosz Year in 2011, he organized an international symposium on "Miłosz's Warsaw" and also gave talks and lectures in the US at Cornell (Ithaca) and Yale (New Haven), as well as at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the University of Toronto in Canada. He also gave lectures at Sapienza University of Rome, at the Centre Universitaire Malesherbes at the Sorbonne in Paris, at Circulos de Bellas Artel in Madrid, and at the University of Kyiv. He was a member of the Committee for the Evaluation of Scientific Institutions at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education between 2011 and 2014. In 2012, following the reorganization of the Department of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, he was appointed head of the Research Group for the Literature and Culture of Late Modernity at IBL PAN. He was made state-appointed professor in 2013. That year, he was appointed to the jury and Chapter of the Inka Brodzka-Wald Competition, organized by the Academy for the Development of Philanthropy in Poland. Between 2012 and 2015, he was leader of the research project "Zwrot afektywny po roku 1989. Strategie i style reprezentacji w interdyscyplinarnej perspektywie badawczej" (The Affective Turn after 1989: Interdisciplinary research perspectives on strategies and styles of representation), which was funded by the National Science Centre (NCN). He remains a member of the Open Republic Association against Antisemitism and Racism. He is a ministerial advisor at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, serving on the Ministerial Advisory Body, the Committee for the Evaluation of Scientific Institutions, and the Commission for Humanities and Social Sciences at the ministry. In 1977, he married the translator of Spanish Ewa Szewczyk. He is father to Zofia (b. 1981) and Stanisław (b. 1986). He lives in Warsaw.