Zosia KuczyŃska
Creative-critical queer archival and poetic investigations.
I’m an academic, poet, and practice-based researcher currently based in Oslo as an independent scholar. I’m interested in combining critical and creative approaches to archives, particularly in the context of queer justice.
Brian Friel’s Models of Influence OUT NOW with Palgrave Macmillan.
Academic
My research specialisms include the literary archives of playwright Brian Friel, creative-critical archival methodologies, queer archival praxis, contemporary queer writing, and contemporary poetry. My monograph, Brian Friel’s Models of Influence, is published with Palgrave Macmillan.
I am the author of two poetry pamphlets with The Emma Press, Pisanki (2017) and With others in your absence (2021). My work is featured in Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021). I was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2022.
I curated the digital exhibition Don’t Anticipate the Ending for the Museum of Literature Ireland, based on a practice-based collaborative research project of the same name. My creative collaborators include performance-maker Robbie Blake and dancer-choreographer Jessie Keenan.
Poetry
‘Eight Poems’, in Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Belfast: The Lifeboat Press, 2021), pp. 162–174.
‘After the party’, in Local Wonders: Poems of our Immediate Surrounds, ed. by Pat Boran (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2021), p. 93.
With others in your absence (Birmingham: The Emma Press, 2021).
‘Second Person Singular’, The White Review, Issue 27 (March 2020), pp. 79–84.
‘The Gift Shop Elegies #9’, in We’ve Done Nothing Wrong We’ve Nothing to Hide: The Verve Anthology of Diversity Poems, ed. and intr. by Andrew McMillan (Exeter: Verve Poetry Press, 2020), pp. 57–61.
‘“No time to wait til her mouth can”’, in Happy Browsing: An Anthology in Praise of Bookfinders (Belfast: The Lifeboat Press, 2018), p. 65.
‘Cliffhanger’, Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 129 (Winter 2019), p. 96.
‘On Woolacombe Beach’, The Tangerine, Issue 5 (Spring 2018), p. 28.
Pisanki, intr. by Bernard O’Donoghue (Birmingham: The Emma Press, 2017).
“Kuczynska narrates a bond between generations, one that has led her to depict the pear trees and “metal-sown” fields of her grandmother’s memories. Pisanki is a spellbinding tapestry of images and emotions, of displacement, loss and hope.”– PBS Bulletin
“There’s an honesty in these poems, conveyed through language that is raw, open-hearted, simple, and yet at the same time, weaves around each part of itself, to complicate matters.”– Manuela Moser, The Seamus Heaney Centre’s Friday Critique
Projects
Current Project
‘The Picture Palace‘ by Jessie Keenan
'Don't Anticipate the Ending'
How might one artist’s ways of working generate new ways of making art for contemporary practitioners through archival engagement?
This collaborative practice-based research project was based on the literary archives of playwright Brian Friel.
Between 2018 and 2021, I worked with dancer-choreographer Jessie Keenan, performance-maker Robbie Blake, and a company of performers, facilitating creative responses to the Brian Friel Papers.
Funded by the Irish Research Council and Arts Council Ireland.
Academic
Professional Experience
University of Southampton
Oct 2022 – June 2023
Teaching Fellow in English Literature
University College Dublin
Oct 2018 – April 2021
Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University College Dublin, Applied Languages Centre
Jul 2018 – Aug 2018
Presessional Tutor in English for Academic Purposes
University of Nottingham
Jan 2017 – Jul 2018
Teaching Affiliate (School of English)
Queen’s University Belfast
Feb 2016 – April 2016
Guest Lecturer (MA Irish Poetry)
Trinity College Dublin
Jan 2013 – April 2016
Teaching Associate (School of English)
Publications
Monograph
Kuczyńska, Zosia, Brian Friel’s Models of Influence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
The Brian Friel Papers at the National Library of Ireland are a record of a life’s work in progress. They represent a way of working and of making art over a period spanning more than fifty years. This book is the first of its kind in its attempt to interrogate the role of the Brian Friel Papers in Friel’s legacy as a working artist with a richly developed creative practice. By means of an unprecedented focus on Friel’s artistic process, I ask not only how and by whom Friel was being influenced and inspired, but also how and for whom Friel’s praxis might come to be an inspiration. Combining forensic archival scholarship with original, collaborative practice-based research, I remain focused on the ‘how’ of influence, showcasing an approach to literary archives that foregrounds live practices of access in the spirit of creative encounter. Whether uncovering forgotten source materials for Friel’s plays or working with current practitioners in the arts, I reveal how an approach to literary archives grounded in artistic practice might provide the tools for setting a major creative legacy not in stone but rather in motion.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Published
Kuczyńska, Zosia, ‘“[A] disoriented vision of…fact”: Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer’, Irish University Review 50.2 (November 2020): 319–336.
Cullen, Sarah and Zosia Kuczyńska, ‘Review: Literary Archives in the Digital Age’, U.S. Studies Online, 6 October 2017 <http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/literary-archives-digital-age/> [accessed 2 July 2018]
Kuczyńska, Zosia, ‘“Afterwards always came after before’: post-catastrophic space-time in the plays of Graves and MacNeice’, Gravesiana 4.1 (Summer 2014): 162–181.
Accepted for publication
Kuczyńska, Zosia, ‘‘Censorship Public and Censorship Private: Authority, Authenticity, and Acceptability in the Early Production History of Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!’, Modern Drama, FORTHCOMING.
In preparation for submission
Kuczyńska, Zosia and Katherine Wyers, ‘Queering data justice: using archival methodologies to recover transgender histories in healthcare data’, Journal of Information Science.
Book Chapters
In preparation for submission
Kuczyńska, Zosia, ‘“Drag Poetica”: the Drag Lyric as Lyric Drag’, The Routledge Companion to Drag (forthcoming)
Editorial Assistant
Morash, Chris and Nicholas Grene, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (Oxford: OUP, 2016).
Get in touch
Interested in my work? Got a collaboration in mind? Let me know!