Celebration at the Institute of English Studies

prof. dr hab. Jan Cygan
(1927-2021)

Prof. Jan Cygan was an eminent linguist and specialist in the history of the English language and a long-standing director of the Institute of English Studies.

Prof. Cygan was born in Lviv in 1927. In 1950, he obtained a master’s degree in English studies at the University of Wrocław. From 1950 to 1965, he worked as an English tutor at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. During this period, he also served as director of the Institute of Foreign Languages at PWr. In 1958-1959, he studied applied linguistics as a British Council scholarship holder at the University of Edinburgh. In 1965 he defended his doctoral thesis and was employed at the University of Wrocław – first as an adjunct professor (1965-1968) and then as a reader (1968-1977), associate professor (1977-1991) and full professor (1991-1998). In 1971, Prof. Cygan obtained his habilitation on the basis of his dissertation Aspects of English Syllable Structure. In the 1970s and 1980s, the professor held research fellowships at, among others, the Jagiellonian University, the Centre for Applied Linguistics in Arlington, University College London, the University of Austin and New York’s Columbia University. His major book publications, in addition to the aforementioned habilitation monograph, include the following: Interrogation in English (1973), Strukturalne podstawy gramatyki angielskiej (1976), and Język angielski na tle porównawczym: komentarz historyczny do wybranych zagadnień fonologii i morfologii (1990).

Prof. Cygan was also the founder and head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Wrocław in 1969-1975, and from 1975 the director of the newly established Institute of English Studies, which he headed (with a break in 1987-1991) until 1996. Prof. Cygan was also the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Anglica Wratislaviensia” in 1971-1998. After his retirement, in 2002, prof. Cygan created a historical outline of our Institute entitled Z dziejów wrocławskiej anglistyki. In 2015. Rector of the University of Wrocław awarded prof. Cygan the Golden Medal of the University of Wrocław for his outstanding contribution to the development of the University.

prof. dr hab. Joanna Błaszczak
(1971-2021)

Prof. Błaszczak was a professor of humanities, head of the Laboratory for Experimental Research in Language, founder and coordinator of the study Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics (ETHEL) and a long-time employee of the Institute of English Studies.

Prof. Błaszczak completed her studies in linguistics and economics at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She continued her academic career at the same university, where she completed her doctoral studies with distinction and received her PhD in 2000. She received her habilitation degree in 2008 at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Potsdam. From 1999 to 2008 she worked at the University of Potsdam, first as a researcher in various projects, then as an assistant professor at the Institute of General Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. In 2008 she was employed at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin in the project “Sprachen an Deutschlands Schulen”. On 1 October 2008, she was appointed associate professor at the University of Wrocław. Since then, she has worked at the Faculty of Letters, Institute of English Studies. In 2008, she took over the leadership of the Laboratory of General and Comparative Linguistics, which was transformed into the Laboratory of Experimental Research on Language in 2015. In addition, Prof. Błaszczak was the head of the publishing house of the Center for General and Comparative Linguistics and, since 2015, the coordinator of the Master’s programme in English based on Western models ‘Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics’ (ETHEL).

Beginning in 2010, Prof. Błaszczak was awarded various grants in national and international competitions (three FNP grants, an OPUS/NCN grant, two DAAD grants for Polish-German projects and a grant from the Polish-German Foundation for Science for a joint project with Leibniz-ZAS Berlin). As part of the grants she obtained, she organised a modern research laboratory and two psycholinguistic laboratories. For her organisational and scientific activities, she received, among others, the Rector’s Award of the University of Wrocław four times, the Award of the Minister of Science and Higher Education in 2015, as well as the Polish Intelligent Development Award 2019 in the category ‘Scientist of the Future’. Prof. Błaszczak has supervised more than 30 master’s theses and has also promoted four doctoral theses at the University of Wrocław.

On 11 February 2021, five months before her death, prof. Błaszczak was awarded the title of professor of humanities.