Prof. Dr. Magdalena Maczynska

Magdalena Maczynska is an associate professor of English and world literatures at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, where she teaches courses in contemporary Anglophone fiction, literary theory, and academic writing. Her research interests include postmodernist, postcolonial, and post-religious fiction; the history (and future) of the novel; urban theory and creative practice; intersectional ecocritical theory; critical pedagogy; and, most recently, the genre of “cli-fi” or climate fiction.

Magdalena has published articles on the construction of fictional urban spaces in the age of nuclear anxiety, the aesthetics and politics of the Black British novel, and the use of nonhuman and hybrid subjectivities in recent Anglophone fiction. Her first book looks at the appropriation of canonical Christian scriptures in contemporary post-religious narratives. She is currently working her way through the emergent canon of climate fiction to see how the immense and daunting subject of climate change tests the generic and thematic limits of the modern novel. This research will form the basis of her second book, which she will begin writing during her stay at the Rachel Carson Center this fall.

RCC Research Project: Representation of Space in Climate Change Fiction

Selected Publications:

• The Gospel According to the Novelist: Religious Scripture and Contemporary Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
• “The God Chip in the Brain: Zadie Smith and Religion.” In Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond, edited by Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
• “Savage Metamorphoses: Animal Transformation in Satirical Urban Fiction.” Critical Engagements 3, no. 2 (2009): 137–54.
• “This Monstrous City: Urban Visionary Satire in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Will Self, China Miéville and Maggie Gee.” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 1 (2010): 58–86.
• “The Aesthetics of Realism in Contemporary Black London Fiction” In “Black” British Aesthetics Today, edited by R. Victoria Arana, 135–49. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.