Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures was established on 1 September 2024, following its separation from the Faculty of Letters. It comprises six units: the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Romance Studies, the Institute of Slavic Studies, the Institute of Classical, Mediterranean, and Oriental Studies, the Chair of Dutch Studies, and the Chair of Jewish Studies. The Faculty encompasses two major academic disciplines: literary studies and linguistics. In total, it employs as many as 240 academic staff members, the vast majority of whom conduct research in the fields of literary studies or linguistics. The remaining research and teaching staff represent disciplines such as history, cultural and religious studies, communication and media studies, philosophy, and sociology.
Each unit conducts research in the fields of language, literature, culture, and history of a specific linguistic area. The Institute of English Studies focuses on research devoted to the English language, theoretical and empirical linguistics, translation studies, language teaching, and the literature and culture of English-speaking countries, with a particular emphasis on the United Kingdom and the United States. The Institute of Romance Studies brings together researchers in the fields of linguistics, literature, and culture of French-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Italian-speaking countries, as well as Romance language teaching and translation studies. Faculty members at the Institute of Slavic Studies conduct linguistic and literary research in the fields of Czech, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Russian studies. The Institute of Classical, Mediterranean, and Oriental Studies continues the traditions of Latin, Hellenic, and Oriental studies from the pre-war Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv, and also conducts research on selected European and Asian languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Modern Greek, and Italian. The Chair of Dutch Studies specializes in research on early Dutch literature, contemporary Dutch and Afrikaans literature, and Dutch linguistics. The Chair of Jewish Studies, on the other hand, brings together researchers whose interests range from the social history of Hasidism, through women’s and gender studies, Yiddish and Ladino literature, the cultural history of 19th- and 20th-century Polish Jews, and research on the history and memory of the Holocaust, to the culture of contemporary Israel.
Currently, the faculty members are carrying out five international research projects funded by foreign grant providers (including the European Union and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe), eleven projects funded by the National Science Centre, three projects under a grant from the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities, one funded by the National Agency for Academic Exchange, and twenty projects funded by ministerial funds (IDUB, Excellent Science).
The Faculty is home to the “Slavicus” Incubator of Scientific Excellence, which is funded by IDUB. The Centre for Corpus and Experimental Research on Slavic Languages was established as part of the Incubator. The Centre’s primary objective is to combine theoretical, computational, and experimental linguistics in comparative research on Slavic and Baltic languages. In addition, four research centers operate within the Faculty. The Center for Research on Children’s and Youth Literature conducts research in which children’s literature and the culture of childhood play a key role. Researchers at the Center combine various research perspectives: historical-literary, literary -cultural, linguistic, reception, translation, translation studies, book studies, and media studies with cultural studies and popular culture research, gender studies, participatory research, research conducted by children, and memory studies. The Center for Cognitive Research on Language and Communication focuses on the cognitive aspects of various forms of human communication, with a particular emphasis on cognitive research into meaning, cognitive grammar, cognitive ethnolinguistics, cognitive research on bilingualism, second and inherited language acquisition, research on the cognitive aspects of multimodal communication, and cognitive corpus and statistical research. The Center for Transcultural Post-Totalitarian Studies is an international research network that, through an interdisciplinary and transcultural comparative approach, aims to horizontally connect the dispersed post-imperial scholarly reflection on post-totalitarian discourses in the cultures and literatures of Central and Eastern European countries. The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on the Relationship between Oral and Written Culture brings together classical philologists, Latinists, Hellenists, historians of philosophy, and linguists exploring the themes of oral tradition and oral literature.
In addition, the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Cultures hosts as many as fourteen student and doctoral research clubs.
