Tamara Trojanowska

A graduate of the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto (PhD) and of Theatre Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (MA), Tamara Trojanowska has also formerly held an Oxford University scholarship and an internship at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. She has taught at universities in Poland, Canada, and the United States, returning to University of Toronto as a faculty member in 1998. Since then, she has directed the Polish Language and Literature Program at the Slavic Department, strengthening in strides its profile and presence in North America, as well as the University College Drama Program (2008-2012). In 2012, together with Stephen Johnson, then director of the Graduate Drama Centre, she integrated the two units to form the Center for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, with which she was cross appointed. She served as Director of the Centre (2017-2021) where she co-founded the BMO Lab in Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies, and AI. She is now Vice-Dean Faculty and Academic Life in the Faculty of Arts and Science.

Her current research focuses on the intersections of drama and theatre with history, philosophy, and religious thought, and emphasizes issues of identity, subversion, and transgression, topics that she has published on in Poland, Canada, United States, and England. Her latest book, co-edited with Joanna Niżyńska and Przemysław Czapliński and entitled Being Poland. A New History of Polish Literature and Culture Since 1918 (UT Press, 2018), presents over sixty commissioned essays by scholars from all over the world, including her extensive analysis of the transgressive practices in Polish drama and theatre (“Delectatio furiosa, or the modes of cultural transgression”). She has also contributed an article on this subject to Magda Romańska and Cathleen Cioffi’s Theatermachine: Tadeusz Kantor in Context (Northwestern UP, 2019), with her investigations of the dramatic and the sacred resulting in a new selection of, and an extensive introduction to, the plays of Roman Brandstaetter (Dzień gniewu. Dramaty, Instytut Badań Literackich, 2016). Her analysis of Tadeusz Różewicz’s The White Marriage appeared in the Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (eds. Tomasz Bilczewski, Stanley Bill, Magdalena Popiel, 2021). Her latest article, “My answer to the question ‘What is art’,” can be found in Annals of Cultural Studies. Vol. 4 (2023). She has also completed her new book on transgressive cryptotheologies in Polish 20^th-century drama and theatre.

Alongside her continuing administrative and research work, Trojanowska also sits on the Advisory Boards of several professional journals, including Didaskalia (Jagiellonian University, Kraków), Polish Theatre Perspective (UK), Postscriptum (Silesian University, Poland), and Teksty Drugie (Kraków).