13,000 km has proved no barrier to scholarly collaboration. The AMU Faculty of English (WA UAM) has launched a cooperation with the Faculty of Letters at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Dr Urszula Kizelbach (WA UAM) and Dr Eric Rundquist (PUC), two very determined colleagues living on two different continents, wanted their universities to work closer together. It happened thanks to Erasmus +, an exchange programme set up by the European Union. Erasmus + fosters educational mobility, innovation in research, and European and global integration of academic communities in the 27 countries of the European Union together with The Republic of North Macedonia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Turkey, Serbia, United Kingdom and Chile.
The collaboration started with the promotion of stylistics, a relatively new field in the humanities at Polish and Chilean universities.Stylisticians specialise in the linguistic analysis of literary texts. Their main platform of communication is the conference organised annually by the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), an international scholarly organisation based in the UK, which unites academics from different fields (linguistics and literature), and fosters their research. PALA issues its own newsletter “Parlance”, which reports and keeps track of the Poznań-Santiago collaboration.
The collaboration is still going on and with great success. Dr Rundquist (PUC) visited Poznań in January 2022 and had lectures and classes in stylistics at the Faculty of English. Dr Tomasz Skirecki (WA UAM) visited Santiago in 2022 and gave talks on American history and culture. Also in 2022, UAM had the pleasure of hosting Javiera Castro, a student from Santiago, who attended classes in stylistics and literature, and who even delivered a lecture herself (Digging up my roots: Chilean tradition, history and folklore). A student from Poznań, Michał Sobieralski, is now enjoying a semester in Santiago.
Thanks to Erasmus + students from Chile and Poland have a chance to travel and learn more about the world. It also enables tighter cooperation between members of the staff, and not only in the field of stylistics. We do hope that with our Chilean colleagues, we can work together in other research areas and on a larger scale, e.g. organise conferences, obtain grants, etc.
Eric says: “Pretty soon we expect this project to inspire a major airline to start direct flights from Santiago to Poznań, and eventually for the EU to finance a physical bridge connecting the two continents. But one thing at a time…”.
PALA Newsletter https://www.pala.ac.uk/parlance.html
Dr Skirecki w Santiago https://letras.uc.cl/actividades/conferencia-grant-woods-american-gothic-1930-as-an-icon-of-american-popular-culture-con-dr-tomasz-skirecki/
Współpraca z UAM reklamowana w Santiago http://extension.letras.uc.cl/extension/index.php/agenda/archivo-de-actividades/postula-a-la-beca-uam
