Kaja Marczewska

I am a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures and a member of Information as Material  editorial collective. Before joining Coventry in 2018, I was a Lecturer in English and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster. I completed my PhD at the Department of English Studies, Durham University, supervised by Professor Patricia Waugh and funded by the Von Huegel fellowship and the Durham Doctoral Studentship. I was an Eccles Centre Fellow in American Studies at the British Library in 2014 and a visiting researcher at Dartmouth College, USA in April 2015. In 2018, I will be a Reese Fellow for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas, a Terra Foundation fellow, and a visiting reseracher at The Getty Research Institute library. 

My research is positioned at the intersection of cultural studies, publishing, and art history and theory. My interests include experimental and independent publishing, artists' books, print cultures, economies of cultural production, artists' collectives and forms of self-organisation, experimental art and writing, as well as intersections of humanities, technology and law. 

I have recently completed my fist book - The is not a copy: writing at the Iterative Turn (Bloomsbury Academic 2018) - which investigates the implications of the propensity to copy as a creative practice in contemporary culture. In this project, I explore contemporary approaches to cultural production as a manifestation of what I call the Iterative Turn in order to re-think copying in art and writing as a critical praxis. 

My current research builds on ideas explored in my monograph and interrogates diverse developments triggered by or related to The Iterative Turn, including the emergence of curatorial culture as a dominant contemporary model of cultural production, practices of re-performance and re-staging exhibitions, and contemporary uses of appropriation in digital media, film, and photography. These interests are related to my ongoing project - Appropriation Now - exploring the history of appropriation art from 1970s to the present. 

My second monograph, in progress, focuses on self-publishing as an artistic strategy from 1960s onwards. The project explores transformations of reproduction technologies as they impact on production and distribution models of art and writing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The project explores diverse forms of self-publishing  - from artists' books, through ephemera, zines and photo-books, to contemporary forms of post-digital print - to ask questions about changing economies of cultural production. In the book, I focus in particular on exploring the role of self-publishing as a tool of self-organisation and collectivism and the role of DIY, disruptive, and alternative models of publishing in the field of cultural production. 

I have a long-standing interest in hybrid creative-critical forms and in alternative forms of making research public. In 2015/16, I curated a series of events at Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London showcasing contemporary experimental writing practices and interrogating ideas of experimentation in the arts today. I was also the organiser of the UK premiere of Mark Amerika's Immobilité, an experimental mobile phone film, which was shown in May 2016 at the Regent Street cinema in London, and a curator of Forms of Criticism symposium at Parasol Unit, London in June 2016. The latter brought together artists, curators, critics, writers and academics engaging in hybrid creative-critical practices.