Katarzyna Ojrzyńska’s interests mostly focus on cultural disability studies, performance studies, and Irish studies. Her main research project investigates the depictions of the victims of Action T4 in contemporary culture and – in particular – in works of disabled artists. She co-founded ULCIS (University of Lodz Centre for Irish Studies) and is a board member of EFACIS (European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies). She has been collaborating with PAIS (Polish Association for Irish Studies), Beckett Research Group in Gdańsk, and the Downtown Centre of Inclusive Art. She is language editor of Prace Polonistyczne.
The doctoral degree that she earned in 2013 was based on a dissertation on the representation of dance in contemporary Irish drama. The dissertation was later revised, expanded, and published as “Dancing as if language no longer existed”: Dance in Contemporary Irish Drama (Reimagining Ireland 61, Peter Lang, Oxford 2015), for which the author received a third-degree individual award of the Rector of the University of Lodz.
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska has completed a number of projects related to cultural disability studies as part of University’s internal grants for young scholars. In 2020 she will be running the project entitled: “At the Intersection of Disability Studies and Ecocriticism: Disability and Biodiversity in Selected Cultural Texts” sponsored by PFRON (State Fund for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled). In recent years she has been engaged in popularizing cultural disability studies in Poland. In 2015 she organized the conference Negotiating Space for (Dis)Ability in Drama, Theatre, Film, and Media (2015). As part of her collaboration with Theatre 21 Foundation and the Downtown Centre of Inclusive Art she presented two public lectures: “Recovering the Memory of the Victims of the Disabled Holocaust: History and Culture” (POLIN, 2018) and “Looking at and Perceiving Human Diversity” (Zachęta, 2019). She has translated a number of theoretical texts related to disability studies into Polish (published in the volume entitled Odzyskiwanie obecności. Niepełnosprawność w teatrze i performansie, ed. Ewelina Godlewska-Byliniak and Justyna Lipko-Konieczna, Fundacja Teatr 21, Warszawa 2017) and – most recently – Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s book Staring: How We Look.
Katarzyna Ojrzyńska supervises BA and MA theses in the fields of literature and culture. In particular, she welcomes students who share her passion for cultural disability studies.