Close Up
Ziarek’s UB career comes full circle
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“The idea of us coming to America to study at the time was like going to the moon. It seemed absolutely impossible”
Ewa Ziarek, Julian Park Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, refers to her “double arrival” at UB. She first came here as a graduate student in 1985 with her husband, Krzysztof, whom she met at the University of Warsaw.
“The idea of us coming to America to study at the time was like going to the moon. It seemed absolutely impossible,” she recalls. “I came here straight from Poland and didn’t have a clue. It was at the end of martial law (in Poland). When I arrived (at UB), I couldn’t type because at that time you had to have permission to own a typewriter (in Poland). It was a time of censorship and control of the dissemination of the written word. It was a big surprise that I had to type my papers and I didn’t know how to, so it was a culture shock.”
Their figurative trip to the moon—Buffalo—was suggested by American Fulbright scholars who were teaching at the University of Warsaw. They recommended UB at the time because of the Ziareks’ interdisciplinary interest and double-track pursuits of literature and philosophy as master’s students. “We applied to several places and Buffalo accepted us, so we decided to take a risk with this unknown place,” she explains. “It turned out to be a perfect fit.”
After graduating from UB in 1989, they both received teaching offers from the University of Notre Dame. “We decided to stay in this country for many reasons, but one for me was that it was possible to combine an academic career and family life,” she says. “Also, the access to books, the library and computers.”
The couple had reached full professorship at Notre Dame when two openings appeared in UB’s Department of Comparative Literature—one for a specialist in feminist theory and another for an expert in poetry (Krzysztof is a poet)—for which they were encouraged to apply. That was 1994 and the heralding of the Ziareks’ second arrival at UB.
“At first, the experience was very different but the sense of the cutting-edge intellectual work, excitement and interdisciplinary inquiry remained the same,” she says. “I wanted to put these intellectual ideals into my pedagogical practice, continue my own research and to build institutional structures that support this kind of experimental intellectual ethos. I’ve been very fortunate to be on the faculty here.”
Ziarek describes her experience in the department as enriching. “I value both collaborating with my colleagues, but also the teaching, having interdisciplinary and international graduate students. That’s new for me,” she says. “Right now, I’m teaching a seminar on (German-American political theorist) Hannah Arendt and (Bulgarian-French philosopher and feminist) Julia Kristeva; I have students from Comparative Literature, English, art, musicology, Philosophy and American Studies. Students from Korea, Algeria, Poland, Slovenia, Germany, China and America. That’s very exciting. Maybe because I am a naturalized immigrant, to be in this kind of international company at UB and trying to create a welcoming environment for all my students is priceless.”
The founding director of UB’s Humanities Institute, Ziarek is now on an institute fellowship, launching her third book in a trilogy on feminist theory and contributions to Western culture that began in 2001 with “An Ethics of Dissensus” (Stanford) and continued with her second, “Feminist Aesthetics,” to be published by Columbia in 2013.
The third book, “Natality and Biopolitics,” will explore possibilities and limitations of the feminist politics of “natality”—a term she borrowed from Arendt—in the age of globalization. For Ziarek in this context, natality has a three-pronged meaning: to biological birth, to the influx of newcomers to political life, and to the possibility of a new beginning.
She combines this concept with biopolitics, a new area of political theory and medical research. “It represents a shift in politics, where the quality of human life becomes a political issue. We can see that most dramatically in such issues as abortion, right to death, medical euthanasia and stem-cell research. The explicit discussion of biopolitics is missing in Arendt’s philosophy. I want to develop it from a feminist perspective by focusing particularly on the area of human birth, reproduction, as well as citizenship and ‘naturalization’.”
Ziarek points out that this is a rich topic that might lead to more than one book. With that in mind, she is considering subsequent interdisciplinary international collaborations—with Rosalyn Diprose, a philosophy professor at the University of South Wales, Australia, a political theorist with experience in biomedical ethics, as well as with colleagues in the UB Law School who have been dealing with the question of reproductive rights. The book or books has the potential, she agrees, to attract a crossover readership.
She contends that Buffalo has been a great place to live and has found the university to be very open-minded. “When we were first here as graduate students with a small child, it was great to be embraced by other professors and graduate students who were in a similar situation,” she recalls. Their son, Lukasz, recently earned his PhD at Purdue University, where he is teaching computer science as a visiting professor.
“And now what we appreciate about UB are not only the intellectual opportunities, but also the cutting-edge art, music and poetry,” she says. “Being among artists as well as scholars is very important for us. The artistic environment of the university and of Buffalo is important to us and that’s what makes it exciting to be here.”
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