Marta Zboralska

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art and Bowra Junior Research Fellow at Wadham.

My current research project, Art After Witold Gombrowicz, maps responses to the Polish writer across the field of visual art. Demonstrating the author’s wide-ranging, transnational influence on artists – which has thus far escaped recognition – I use art-historical methodologies to study how Gombrowicz’s prose has been transformed into a variety of materials and mediums, traversing geographical contexts.

I completed my PhD at UCL in 2020, with a thesis titled The Art of Being Together: Inside the Studio of Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński. The final chapter of my doctorate won the Association for Women in Slavic Studies 2020 Graduate Essay Prize. I was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in 2017, Project Assistant on the Getty Foundation-funded initiative Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History in 2019-20, and Alexander M. & Christina Schenker Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, in 2024.

In 2022, my Art Journal article 'Living Color: Henryk Stażewski’s Interior Models' was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize. My latest publications include 'Henryk Stażewski’s Art in America' (Archives of American Art Journal, Spring 2023) and 'Impotence and Incompetence: Edward Krasiński’s Art and Writing' (Oxford Art Journal, August 2024). I have written book and exhibition reviews for ARTMargins Online, Third Text Online and caa.reviews. With Dorota Jagoda Michalska, I am currently editing a collection titled Critical Approaches to Art, Race and Coloniality in Eastern Europe.

Before commencing my fellowship, I lectured at Oxford's Department of History of Art, UCL, and the University of Essex.