Deputy Director for Academic Affairs (since October 2024). Assistant Professor at the Film and Visual Culture Section. Cultural studies scholar, researcher of visual culture and 20th century history of Poland. Her research focuses on the politics of representing class structures and economic systems, and the question of how class identities are modelled through cultural representations. She teaches classes about class structure in 20th century and contemporary Poland, methodologies of visual culture studies, and theories and politics of identity.
Author of two monographs and numerous academic articles published in New Literary History, Journal of Visual Culture, Oxford Art Journal, Theoretical Practice, Teksty Drugie, Kultura i Społeczeństwo, Didaskalia, among others. Her first book, Normy widzialności. Tożsamość w czasach transformacji [Norms of Visibility. Identity in Times of Transition, 2016], was devoted to the role played by images in the introduction of neoliberal values and identities in post socialist Poland.
In her latest monograph, Poruszeni. Awans i emocje w socjalistycznej Polsce [Feeling Moved. Upward Mobility and Emotions in Socialist Poland, 2023], Szcześniak proposes the category of “socialist upward mobility stories” to capture the wide-ranging discussions about upward mobility in socialism. Through a careful analysis of diverse sources – literature, film, popular press, and television, as well as working-class diaries – she attempts to reconstruct the “structures of feeling” of socialist upward mobility. The book was the Finalist of the Marcin Król Award in 2024 and was nominated to the Gdynia Literary Award (Essay category), the “Polityka” Historical Books Award, the Jerzy Gierdroyć Award, among others.
Szcześniak is also the co-author of the two-volume publication Kultura wizualna w Polsce [Visual Culture in Poland, 2017] and the co-editor, with Frances Guerin (University of Kent), of Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024. Between 2012 and 2023 she was the editor of the online, bilingual academic journal View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, where she edited issues devoted to capitalist realism, queer images, visual cultures of protest, and visual cultures of class amongst others.
Two-time Fulbright scholar (2010/11 Junior Advanced Research Grant at the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester; 2019/20 Senior Award, Institute for Critical Theory, Duke University) and mentor in the TopMinds program, run by Fulbright Poland. Recipients of stipends and grants from the Ministry of Higher Education (Stipend for outstanding young scholars, 2017–2020); National Science Center (PRELUDIUM, 2013–2015 and SONATA, 2018–2023); the Polityka Academic Award (2017) and the IDUB program at the University of Warsaw.
For publications see: ResearchGate.