In the shortest, I would say I am a queer academic (free up you imagination and wonder to what it might mean for you, for me, for others…), researching queer theories (always already in plural!), social movements, national and sexual identities, socio-cultural conditioning of knowledge production, and polish post-communist transformation. I am in an ongoing process of Ph.D. writing at School of Psychosocial Studies, BirkbeckCollege, London, UK. The thesis focuses on the emergence and the formation of “gay identity” and “gay community” in the post-1989 Poland, and their impact on the reconfigurations of the national identity. My background is in cultural studies (MA at JagiellonianUniversity, Krakow) and anthropology of culture (WarsawUniversity).
I have been working on various projects concerning queerness, visual culture, and Central Europe. Among them: editing two special issues (on “Queer Film” and “Camp”) of “Panoptikum. Film/Media/Arts” periodical, and most recently, special issue (on “Queer Methodologies”, co-edited with Mia Liinason) of the Graduate Journal of Social Science. I have published in “Europe-Asia Studies”, “InterAlia”, “Identities”, Film Quarterly”, written book chapters for “LGBTQ America Today”, “Encyclopedia of Gender and Society” and “Understanding Gender”, plus many others. Please visit my website for a comprehensive summary: www.robertkulpa.com
My research interests vary significantly (from mood to feeling, from day to night, from hope to reality…), but some of them could be: queer approaches and studies; identities; sexuality, gender and nationality; dissemination of knowledge as the hegemony of “Global North” over the rest of the World; feminist/queer/post-modern epistemologies: standpoints, situated knowledges, self-reflexivity, and possibilities of resistance; post-communist transformations and power inequalities between “West” and “East”; discourse- especially critical discourse analysis (Wodak, Fairclough, Blommaert) and discourse theory (Mouffe and Laclau, Howarth). I pray to Judith Butler and Michel Foucualt, dream of Feyerabend, and wank to… this, I will not tell you.
