Animal Adaptations

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.

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).

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!

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...