GRACZYK Ewa

Born on 24 August 1953 in Gdynia; daughter of the economist Tadeusz Graczyk and the teacher Irena, née Zygmunt. She was a pupil at the Grammar School No. I in the Orłowo district of Gdynia, where she completed her advanced secondary education in 1972. She then started a degree in Polish philology at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Gdansk (UG). She graduated with a master's degree in 1977, which was awarded for her study of the short stories of Stanisław Brzozowski. She was supervised by Prof. Maria Janion. In 1982/83, she lived in Warsaw. In 1983, she was appointed to a position at the Department of Literary Theory and Art Criticism at the Institute of Polish Philology of the Faculty of Humanities at UG (which from 2006 to 2010 was the Department of Literary and Anthropology and Art Criticism before becoming the Chair of Literary Theory and Criticism). She defended her doctoral thesis, Egzystencja i rewolucja. Dwa wybory Stanisławy Przybyszewskiej (Existence and Revolution: Stanisława Przybyszewska's two choices), at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) in Warsaw in 1986. She was again supervised by Prof. Maria Janion. In her research, she focused primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish literature, in particular women's writing, as well as the theory of literature, gender studies, post-dependency discourses, and the connections between contemporary literature and social contexts. Between 1994 and 1998, she lived in France, working as a Polish language tutor at University of Toulouse II le Mirail. Between 2000 and 2005, she was academic coordinator of the UG Gender Studies Circle. She was awarded a habilitation degree in 2005 from the Faculty of Philology and History at UG for her study Przed wybuchem wstrząsnąć. O twórczości Witolda Gombrowicza w okresie międzywojennym (Shake before Exploding: On Witold Gombrowicz's interwar works). From 2008 until 2012, she served a director of the Institute of Polish Philology at UG. From 2014, she coordinated the activities of the Post-Dependence Studies Centre at UG as the Faculty of Philology representative. The same year, she became a member of the Gender Center Foundation and was appointed editor-in-chief of the UG online journal "Jednak Książki". She was made state-appointed professor in 2015. In 2015, she joined the Polish Association of European Romanticism Studies. The same year, she became a member of the chapter of the Witold Gombrowicz Literary Prize. In 2016, she became academic coordinator of the Research Centre for Narratives about Women and Women's Narratives (Pracownia Badań Narracji o Kobietach i Kobiet). He articles and reviews appeared in periodicals including "Migotania, Przejaśnienia" (2008-09), "Teksty Drugie" (2010), "Schulz Forum" (2013 and 2018), and "Krytyka Polityczna" (2012-2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018). She was also engaged in social activism as a member of NEWW Poland – Network of East-West Women from 1999, while from 2004 she co-organized the Manifa women's demonstrations in the Tricity and from 2014 the Pomeranian Women's Congreses and the Tricity Women's Action. She joined the "Krytyka Polityczna" Club and Tolerado Association, supporting LGBT rights. She stood for election to the European Parliament in 2019, the Polish Sejm (parliament) in 2023, and the Voivodeship parliament (Sejmik) in 2024 as a candidate of the Lewica (Left) Electoral Committee. She lives in Gdansk.