Marianna Szczygielska

Marianna Szczygielska received her PhD in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. Her work engages human-animal studies, queer theory, and feminist science and technology studies to examine the history of zoos and animal collections from an intersectional perspective. She was awarded the Feminist Animal Studies Fellowship in honor of Marti Kheel at the Wesleyan University (CT). She has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Science and CEFRES French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences in Prague within the Bewildering Boar project. Between 2018 and 2022 Marianna has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. Her latest research project explores the history of keeping elephants in captivity in Eastern Europe with a focus on the trajectories of colonial trades in zoo specimens and ivory. Marianna is an Associate Editor of the Humanimalia journal. She is currently working on her monograph titled Captive Sexualities: Species, Race, and Zoos. 

Select Publications:

• Szczygielska, Marianna (2021). “Od kości słoniowej do plastiku, czyli nienaturalna historia wymierania w epoce antropocenu.” [“From ivory to plastic, or the unnatural history of extinction in the age of the Anthropocene.”] Kultura Współczesna 113(1): 28-42.
• Steinbock, Eliza, Marianna Szczygielska, and Anthony Clair Wagner, eds. (2021). Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Animal and Trans* Studies. London: Routledge.
• Szczygielska, Marianna (2020). “Elephant Empire: Zoos and Colonial Encounters in Eastern Europe.” Cultural Studies 34 (5): 789–810. 
• Szczygielska, Marianna and Olga Cielemęcka (2019). “Plantarium: Human-Vegetal Ecologies.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience 5 (2): 1–12. 

Contact:
Dr. Marianna Szczygielska
Comparative Gender Studies
m.szczygielska[at]berlin.bard.edu