Katarzyna A. Małecka works at the Department of North American Literature and Culture, Lodz University. She is the author of numerous publications on death and grief in literature, including Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell (2008) and Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance (2013). She has been awarded three international scholarships to conduct her research on loss and bereavement: the interdisciplinary research grant by the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to study the bibliotherapeutic aspects of literature in work with grieving children; the Fulbright Senior Award Scholarship for her project on the use of modern bereavement memoirs in grief therapy; and the Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship to study the grief witnessing, bibliotherapeutic, and educational aspects of grief memoirs. She is currently working on her new project exploring the bibliotherapeutic application of grief narratives in the clinical setting and their use in the education of future helping professionals.

Select publications

Books:

1. Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance. Routledge, 2023.

2. Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell. Cambria Press, 2008

Chapters in Books of Collected Articles:

1. Katarzyna Małecka and Janie Taylor. “Response writing dialogues.” Techniques of Grief Therapy:Bereavement and Beyond.Ed. Robert Neimeyer. Routledge, 2022. 309-314.

2. “Stranger than Fiction: Gothic Themes in Bereavement Memoirs of Spousal Loss.” Gothic Peregrinations: The Unexplored and Re-explored Territories. Ed. Agnieszka Łowczanin and Katarzyna Małecka. Routledge, 2019. 248-261.

3. “Remembering, Forgetting and Healing in Modern Bereavement Memoirs.” Memory: Forgetting and Creating. Ed. Wojciech Owczarski, Zofia Ziemann and Amanda Chalupa. Gdańsk UP, 2016. 234-243.

4. “The W Word: Modern Ways of Grieving in The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates.” And Death Shall Have Dominion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Dying, Caregivers, Death, Mourning and the Bereaved. Ed. Katarzyna Małecka and Rossanna Gibbs. Inter-Disciplinary Press: Oxford, 2015. 187-196. E-book.

5. “‘It’s a Mr. Death or something. He has come about the reaping. I don’t think we need any at the moment’: Death and the Denial of Death in the Works of Monty Python.” Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts in Monty Python. Ed. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz. Introduction by Terry Jones. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. 3-22.

6. “‘There Are Things Much Worse than Death’: (Im)mortality and (Im)morality in the Harry Potter Series.” (Non)omnis moriar: Cultural and Literary Discourses of Death and Immortality. Ed. Irmina Wawrzyczek and Aleksandra Kędzierska. Maria Curie-Skłodowska UP, 2012. 241-247.

Articles in Journals:

1. “The Pure Lover and The Mature Griever: The literary expression of grief in David Plante’s memoir and its cultural, educational, and therapeutic significance.” Psychology & Sexuality. Vol. 13, 2022 - Issue 4; pp. 996-1009

2. “‘Have you heard about X?’: (Mis)management of mortality in academia.” Death Studies, vol. 46,

no. 7, 2022, pp.1678–1688.

3. Małecka, Katarzyna A., and Jamison S. Bottomley. “Grief Memoirs: The Familiarity of Helping

Professionals with the Genre and its Potential Incorporation into Grief Therapy.” Death Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 2020, pp. 842–-850.

4. “The Self Lost, the Self Adjusted: Forming a New Identity in Bereavement Memoirs by American Women.” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies, vol. 50, no. 2/3, 2015, pp. 155-174.

5. “In Praise of Slacking: Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks as Hallmarks of 1990s American Independent Cinema Counterculture.” Text Matters 5, 2015. pp. 189-204.

6. “A Literary Medical History: Aging, Illness and Death in Philip Roth’s Everyman.” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, vol. 59, no. 4, 2012, pp. 481-495.

7. “‘The Dude Abides’: How The Big Lebowski Bowled Its Way From a Box Office Bomb To Nation-Wide Fests.” Text Matters 2, 2012, pp. 76-93.