Animal Adaptations

We're absolutely thrilled to share a one-of-a-kind discovery made by Justyna Wlodarczyk 🥳

As we delve ever further into the growing corpus of book-to-film adaptations that form the basis of our research, it has become increasingly apparent that a troubling number of silent films featuring animal protagonists have not survived the passage of time. Many of these works are now classified as missing—presumed lost to nitrate decay, neglect, or the contingencies of early film history.

However, owing to Justyna's efforts, the world of silent film has regained a production long considered lost.

Read more under the link in the comments 👇

CFP alert!

One of the planned results of our project is going to be an edited volume that expands on its scope by going beyond book-to-film adaptations. The volume will be co-edited by Justyna and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck) and will be available open-access. Have a look at the CfP and contact us if you're interested in contributing.

CFP: edited volume “Animal Adaptations” — Film Adaptations of Literary Animal Characters, from the Silent Screen to Hollywood's Golden Age We invite proposals for a small number of additional chapters for an edited volume on animal adaptations, edited by Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck). The volume grows out of the project “Animal Adaptations” (funded by Poland’s National Scie...

Here comes the final part of our team introductions. Meet Anna!

Anna is a 4th-year PhD candidate in literary studies at the University of Warsaw. Her dissertation, “Virginia Woolf’s Literary Compost: Writing as a More-than-Human Entanglement” concerns Woolf’s figurations of the creative process in terms of biotic life.

Her research areas include twentieth-century Anglophone writing, ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and critical plant & animal studies. To date, she’s been a Visiting Scholar at Utrecht University and a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow at SUNY New Paltz, NY.

Outside academia, she enjoys independent cinema, a good campus novel, and an occasional hike.

Say hello to another member of our team 🥳 Meet Asia!

Joanna Ziarkowska is an Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of “Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes: Biomedicalization and Embodied Resistance in Native American Literature” (2021) and the co-editor of ”In Other Words: Dialogizing Postcoloniality, Race, and Ethnicity” (2012). She has published several articles and chapters on Native American literature and medical humanities. Her recent article, “Shaping Indian biocitizens: Americanisation through medical education in the TB sanatorium paper Sioux San Sun (1938–1941),” was published in Medical Humanities.

She teaches courses on Indigenous literatures, medical humanities, and film studies at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. She does her best to provide exquisite service to her three cats – Kazia, Batman, and Łatka. She identifies as CCL (crazy cat lady).

Team introductions, part four 🥳

Meet Julia!

In her research, Julia Wilde moves across time and space, exploring medieval hagiographies that depict harmonious relationships between humans and non-humans (particularly in the Irish tradition) and nineteenth-century re-workings of saints’ lives. Currently, she focuses on representations of feral children and on portrayals of animals in children’s literature and film.

She shares her home with a lively group of rescue dogs and cats, and outside academia she is passionate about sabre fencing and various forms of creative work.

Time to introduce another member of our team 🥳

Meet Kamil!

Kamil Chrzczonowicz, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland.

He writes about humor theory, the history of American satire, and the cultural construction of race in the US. He co-created the Humor Lab research group, wrote about the comic aspects of literary classics in the University of Warsaw’s Masters of American Literature book series, and published a monograph about contemporary African American satire (“The Satire of the New Black Renaissance,” Routledge, 2025).

Team introductions, part two 🙂 Meet Jack!

Jack Harrison (PhD in Ethnomusicology, University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw.

His research sits at the intersection of music and human–animal studies and explores what might be revealed about music’s relationship to sociality when society is framed in terms of multispecies entanglements.

His key publications include the book chapter “‘Public Enemy Number One!’: Music and Mosquito Sound in Disney’s The Winged Scourge’ (1943)” (Metzler, 2025), the special issue “Figurations of Interspecies Harmony in North American Literature and Culture” as co-editor (European Journal of American Studies, 2024), and the journal article “From the Horse’s Mouth: Musical ‘Originality’ in Freestyle Dressage” (Ethnomusicology Forum, 2020).

In his spare time, Jack enjoys tap dancing, table tennis, and playing the erhu (a Chinese fiddle).

The time has come to introduce our team. Meet Justyna, our Principal Investigator 🙂

Justyna Włodarczyk heads the Animal Adaptations team and has been doing research in animal studies for over a decade. She has worked on the cultural history of animal training and on literary and visual representations of non-human animals.

In 2018 she published ”Genealogy of Obedience: Reading North American Dog Training Literature, 1850s-2000s”. She has recently co-edited (with Jack Harrison) a special issue of the European Journal of American Studies devoted to figurations of interspecies harmony in American literature and culture.

She's really fascinated with everything canine-related and has lived with multiple dogs for most of her life. This is why she also dabbles with autoethnographic research methods In addition to dogs, she also loves mushrooms and her hobby is truffle-hunting with her dog Mia.

We're absolutely thrilled to announce that, as of September 2025, we began working on our new research project funded by the National Science Center!

Animal Adaptations: Film Adaptations of Literary Animal Character, from the Silent Screen to Hollywood's Golden Age 🎬 🐶

This project explores the fascinating world of adapting animal fiction into film, focusing on movies made between 1919 and 1970. While some of the novels we are looking at have won Pulitzers and some movies have been nominated for Oscars, others are considered a form of popular entertainment or are intended for a purely juvenile audience. What unites them all is the presence of major animal characters.

When a story moves from the page to the screen, especially a story featuring animals, everything changes. The way animals are portrayed, the kind of scenes they are involved in, and even the fact that in films we hear their sounds and see their movement changes our reception of the text. So, what happens to these animal characters during this transformation?

Our project aims to answer some intriguing questions: How do filmmakers decide which parts of an animal’s story to keep and which to change and how do the limitations of working with animal actors influence such choices? How do literary techniques of depicting an animal’s mind (free indirect discourse, first-person narration) translate into film techniques? Are some aesthetic categories (for example, cuteness) associated only with one of the two media? How does having a live animal (or multiple animals) on set affect the way a movie is made? And what ethical issues arise when using real animals in film production?

We are not just looking at the fun stuff—we are also digging into the serious side: the ethical issues related to the process of making movies with animals. One reason why we are looking at non-animated movies, is because it is the liveness of the actors that is key for our approach. For example, did you know that real horses died during the filming of “Jesse James” (1939), which led to the creation of the American Humane Association’s label “No animals were harmed during the making of this movie”? There are also many instances where the behavior of animal in the movie is meant to be read one way (e.g. the animal is happy), while an ethologist’s eye can easily spot that this interpretation is incorrect (e.g. the animal is highly stressed).

This project is not just about the past; it is about understanding how we treat animals in entertainment today. Even though modern movies often use CGI, real animals are still sometimes used, and controversies can arise if they’re mistreated. By looking back at Hollywood’s Golden Age, we can learn how to do better now and in the future.

Stay tuned for updates as we introduce our team!

With a new grant project starting soon, we are also involved in other activities!
👉For instance, the International Post-Humanist Congress "Voices from the Margins: Gender, Posthumanism, Minoritised Cultures, and Decolonial Worldviews" (University of Warsaw, 27th–29th October 2025). There is still time to send your proposals and join us! 🎤

👉The conference, which will take place from 27th to 29th October 2025 at the Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Warsaw, will be held entirely in-person. We invite individual researchers or research groups to submit proposals by the 15th of June including a title, the name(s) of the participant(s) and their academic titles, email, institution, and a 250-word abstract with a bibliography to [email protected]. Proposals for panels of three participants are also welcome. Individual papers should be 20 minutes long. Notification of acceptance will be sent by after 30th of June.

We particularly welcome proposals addressing the following themes:
👉Posthuman and Decolonial Feminism: The posthuman turn versus (andro/anthropo)centrism in literature, theatre, and film;
👉Minoritised Cultures and Indigenous Worldviews: Ontologies, epistemologies, and activism in decolonial (con)texts;
👉The Humanimal Subject: Conceptual and ethical challenges that emerge from destabilising categories of species;
👉Queer and Trans Self-Representations: Alternative autofictions in contemporary culture.
👉Subaltern Auto(bio)graphical Subjects in Dialogue with Activism: Life-writing as a space of resistance;
👉Inter/transcultural Perspectives in Posthuman Epistemologies: Reflections on situated knowledge and the role of marginalised cultures in knowledge production;
👉Relationality and Non-Western Ontologies: Philosophical and cultural explorations of the interdependence between the human and non-human within Indigenous and Afro-diasporic worldviews;
👉Critique of the Anthropocene and Reconfiguring Humanity: Decentralising the human as a central force in ecological crises and global power dynamics;
👉Cultural representations of the posthuman body: intersections of gender, race, and technology;
👉Ecocriticism and Animality: Environmental crises and human–non-human relations from the perspectives of non-hegemonic humanities;
👉New Materialism and the Agency of Things: The agency of objects and their role in social relations, questioning the subject/object dichotomy;
👉Community-based Knowledge and Experiences: The role of racialised, feminised, and minoritised communities, as well as diverse activisms, in constructing epistemic and ontological alternatives;
👉Subversive Politics, Social Movements, and the Creation of Other Possible Worlds: Explorations of the transformative capacity of the margins in posthuman and decolonial visions.

🗣 Conference Languages: Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Euskera

👉 Full call for papers file here:https://neofilologia.uw.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/CFP-ENG.pdf

The "Talking Dogs" Phenomenon on Social Media.🐶

Are dogs that communicate using buttons cute and fascinating? Absolutely. But this phenomenon is far more complex than it may initially appear.

Discover what the Talking Dogs trend truly entails, along with its cultural and historical significance, in the latest publication produced by our team in collaboration with Professor Clive Wynne.

Below, you’ll find the full content of the article, authored by Justyna Wlodarczyk, Jack Harrison, Sara Kruszona-Barełkowska, and Clive Wynne.

Talking Dogs: The Paradoxes Inherent in the Cultural Phenomenon of Soundboard Use by Dogs In recent years, dogs that appear to communicate with people by pressing buttons on soundboards that replay pre-recorded English words have become very popular on social media online. We explore how these dogs belong to a historical tradition that dates back at least to the Middle Ages and peaked in...