WIEGANDT Ewa

Born on 5 November 1939 in Poznan; daughter of the doctors Tadeusz Frąckowiak and Zofia, née Wolska. During the German occupation, she and her parents were deported to the General Government and lived in Radom before returning to Poznan in 1945. She attended Grammar School No. V in the city, completing her advanced secondary education in 1956. That year, she started a degree in Polish philology at the Jagiellonian University (UJ) in Krakow. She was awarded a master's degree in 1961 and subsequently spent a year as an assistant trainee at the Chair in Polish Literature at UJ before beginning a doctoral degree in 1964. She made her debut in 1962 with the article W kręgu „Kamiennego świata” Tadeusza Borowskiego (On Tadeusz Borowski's Kamienny świat [The World of Stone]), which appeared in the journal "Pamiętnik Literacki" (vol. 4; under the name: Ewa Frąckowiak). The article was an excerpt of her master's thesis. She defended her doctoral thesis, Twórczość powieściopisarska Zofii Nałkowskiej w latach 1935-1954 (Zofia Nałkowska's Novels, 1935-1954), in 1970. She was supervised by Prof. Kazimierz Wyka. The following year, she returned to Poznan, where she worked as a lecturer at the Department of Literary Theory at the Institute of Polish Philology (IFP) at the Adam Mickiewicz University(UAM). She conducted research on twentieth-century literature, focusing on works relating to the region of Galicia and other local homelands. She published articles and reviews in periodicals including "Nurt" (1972, 1974, and 1979) and "Teksty" (1975 and 1979). Between 1972 and 1995, she was an examiner and member of the District Committee of the Olympiad in Polish Literature and Language. In 1980, she joined the Independent Self-governing Trade Union Solidarity at the IFP at UAM. She was involved in the activities of the Adam Mickiewicz Literary Society, including a term as deputy chair of the Poznan branch from 1986 to 1989. She was awarded a habilitation degree in 1986 for her study Austria felix, czyli o micie Galicji w polskiej prozie współczesnej (Austria felix, or: The Myth of Galicia in Contemporary Polish Prose). She was appointed senior lecturer at the Department of Poetics and Literary Criticism at UAM in 1989. She was involved in producing publications on methods of teaching literature in middle schools. She published articles on this subject, including one in 1989 as part of a volume of teaching materials that appeared outside the reach of state censorship (using the pseudonym Ewa Wolska). In 1991, she visited Paris on a fellowship funded by the Polish Literary Historical Society in the city and then Vienna as a fellow of the Pax Christi – Werk Janineum Foundation. That year, she was appointed associate professor at UAM. She was made state-appointed professor in 2001 and full professor at UAM in 2005. Between 2003 and 2006, she was head of the Department of Historical Poetics at the Institute of Polish Philology at UAM before joining the Department of Poetics and Literary Criticism in January 2010, when she reached retirement age and was made senior professor. From October 2010, she was involved in the activities of the Chair in Literature at the Department of Humanities at the Jacob of Paradies University in Gorzów Wielkopolski. She was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit in 2010. She married the mechanical engineer Ryszard Wiegandt in 1964; they had two children, Joanna and Piotr. She died on 10 September 2019 in Poznan and is buried at the city's Miłostowo cemetery.