Marta Figlerowicz

Biography

 I am a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Within these timeframes, I study how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Working in over seven languages, in my academic writing I often return to modernism, its genealogies, and its afterlives. My public-facing essays comment on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics. I am a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. 

My first two books, Flat Protagonists (Oxford, 2016) and Spaces of Feeling (Cornell, 2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. My forthcoming third book, It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Transcultural Knowledge (Princeton, 2027), offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. I also recently completed The Maria Janion Reader (Minnesota, 2025), a book-length translation that introduces the Anglophone public to the work of the Polish critical theorist Maria Janion, which was awarded the 2026 Translation Prize from the Modernist Studies Association.

I am currently working on a new monograph, tentatively called Three Essays on Realism, which reconsiders theories of novelistic mimesis through the prism of contemporary literature, as well as on a co-authored volume about comparison across disciplines. 

Research Interests

• Twentieth-and twenty-first century American, Brazilian, British, French, Polish, and West African literature
• Critical theory and art practice in post-socialist countries
• Eighteenth-century British and French literature
• Contemporary Cinema
• The Novel
• Philosophy 
• Anthropology
• Theories of new media

Selected Recent Publications

• “A Half-Suppressed Strangeness,” The Drift, Issue 14 (2024). 
• “Auerbach’s Hunger: Mimesis as an Anthropology of Violence,” boundary 2, (2024) 51 (2): 165–193. 
• “The Mother of the Mother of the Virgin Mary,” The Paris Review Daily, April 7, 2023. 
• “Joyce-Pidgin-Man,” English Literary History 90.2 (2023): 519-538. 
• “Maria Janion’s Uncanny Slavdom,” PMLA 137.1 (2023): 110-126, translated from Polish.  
• “Short Form Proust,” L’Esprit Créateur 62.3 (2022): 25-39.
• “Imagining Ukraine,” Boston Review, March 23, 2022, online. 
• “Widzieć nie znaczy wiedzieć,” [“Seeing is not knowing,”] interviewed by Jacek Żakowski, Polityka 34 (3326): 22-25.
• “It Me,” The Yale Review 109.1 (2021): 109-120. Republished in Polish as “It Me: Problem z memami,” Almanach Concilium Civitas 2021-2022, ed. Jacek Żakowski (Warsaw: Collegium Civitas), 47-60.
• “Democracy on Pause in Pandemic Poland,” Foreign Affairs, May 13, 2020 online. 

Courses

Undergraduate

• James Joyce and Marcel Proust
• Introduction to Narrative
• How to Compare
• Internet Cultures
• Feminist and Queer Theory
• Six Pretty Good Selves
• Tragedy
• World Cinema

Graduate

• lKeywords of Recent Critical Theory
• Literary Theory
• Publication Workshop
• Dissertation Writing Workshop