Sebastian Borowicz

Doctor with habilitation title (dr hab.), culture scholar and classical archaeologist. Currently Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales of the University of Warsaw and member of the team of the Centre for Multimodal Educational and Cultural Research (OMBEiK). Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University until 2024. Member of the Academic Council of Culture and Religion Studies and Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw (2025-2028). From 2015 to 2021, secretary of the Multimodal Educational Strategies Workshop (PMSE) of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. In 2017, coordinator of disciplines at the Polish National Science Centre. Since 2016, member of the Editorial Committee of the Figurae Series of the Jagiellonian University Press. In 2022 Visiting Senior Associate Member in the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) and member of the British School at Athens – An Institute for Advanced Research (full membership). Member of the Polish Archaeological Institute at Athens (PIAA) since 2022. Initiator and coordinator of the Heritage_lab platform and co-founder of the PolishStudies_MindTech platform at OMBEiK. He is involved in comparative and cultural studies on the issues of spatiality, visuality and iconicity in pre-philosophical cultures, the links between postmodernity and archaicity, the reception of ancient themes in modern culture, as well as new technologies and the role of heritage sites in education. He has participated in grant research funded by the Leventis Foundation, Polish Programme ID-UB, Polish National Science Centre (NCN), Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland and the Polish National Centre for Research and Development conducted in the UK, Greece and Cyprus at institutions such as the Warburg Institute, the Knossos Research Centre, BSA, ASCSA, PIAA and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia. He has received scholarships from, among others, the Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology in Cairo, the Government of the Republic of Greece, the Lanckoronski Foundation. He has published, among others, in Konteksty, Teksty Drugie, Études et Travaux, Annals of Art (Pl. Roczniki Humanistyczne) and joint publications. He is a laureate of the Award of His Magnificence Rector of the Jagiellonian University (2021). He is currently preparing a monograph on the perception of space and sensorimotor models in archaic cultures and, as co-editor, the collective volume Technopaideia. Zaawansowane technologie w edukacji – perspektywa humanistyczna (Eng. Technopaideia. Advanced technologies in education – a humanistic perspective) (Jagiellonian University Press WUJ, Narracje w eduk@cji Series).

Books

Technopaideia. Zaawansowane technologie w edukacji – perspektywa humanistyczna, eds. S. Borowicz, J. Hobot-Marcinek (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, Seria Narracje w edukacji, 2024).

Międzyliteratura jako przestrzeń dialogu. Studia dedykowane pamięci Profesor Anny Pilch, eds. A. Włodarczyk, S. Borowicz, K. Wawer (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, Seria Narracje w edukacji, 2022).

Rzeczy i obrazy w kulturze dawnej Grecji (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, seria Figurae, 2020).

Anty-Beatrycze. Studia nad historią kulturową obrazu pijanej i szalonej staruchy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, seria Figurae, 2016), co-author.

Stara rebeliantka. Studia nad semantyką obrazu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo UJ, 2010), co-author.

Journal articles and chapters in collective publications

Sensory heritage and visual environment in pre-philosophical societies, in: Interdisciplinary Dialogues on Natural and Cultural Heritage. An integrated Approach, eds. J. Godlewicz-Admiec, M. Stobiecka, (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, 2025).

Let us rejoice by drinking and talking beautifully – sympotic poetics as a function of culture „Roczniki Humanistyczne” 2024, no. 72:3.

Teoria artefaktu. W stronę krytyki ikoniczności, „Roczniki Humanistyczne” 2022, no. 70:3.

Post(archaiczność) obrazu, „Przestrzenie Teorii” 2020, no. 33.

Cypr w okresie klasycznym, in: Cypr. Dzieje, literatura, kultura, eds. M. Borowska, P. Kordos, D. Maliszewski, vol. 1, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2014.

I work in interpretation and theory of culture. For me, postmodernity is an experimental cognitive space in which I seek tools making it possible to explore archaic, long-vanished worlds. In distant cultures, I find forgotten, magic-oriented ways of thinking that exhibit a remarkable bond of affinity with modernity and technoscience society. At the same time, the study of ancient cultures from a multi- and transmedia perspective becomes a strategy for me to follow “that lovely narrow path / Which winds through / The olive grove”, which is in fact literature, and more broadly, culture.

I studied and lived in Athens for a considerable time, and travelled in the Middle East and North Africa. I also took part in excavations in Greece and Cyprus. I have spent a lot of time researching the cultural topos anus ebria. I like Durrell’s Alexandria, Gide’s writing, the poetry of Kawafis and Simic, Różewicz’s distance towards the world. Of down-to-earth things: the bustle of Madrid, the wilderness of Crete and white wine.

Up to now, we have looked at the culture of archaic Greece from the perspective of further events in the same unfolding story of man, like protagonists of a centuries-old saga situated in its successive chapters – great humanists of the Renaissance, 18th-century antiquarians, explorers of the age of industrialisation, and finally 20th-century architects of hidden structures. As participants in the same Anthropocene epoch, we all tried to depict Greece from the uninterrupted interior of the story. However, with the technological breakthroughs of the early 21st century (non-human entities, bionic creatures, AI), it has come to an end. Presently we live in the culture of the epilogue. It is, to invoke the topicality of the text here, a space of ending, of lingering after; we can say that we live not so much at the end of a work or at the end of events, but in the afterword. It is the time of the completion of a certain story about man; a time when it becomes possible to reflect on what has happened in the cultural plot of our world.

Reliefy rozmazane. Rzeczy i obrazy w kulturze dawnej Grecji, p. 137.

The intense sub-Saharan emptiness, the palaces of the Greek basileis reminiscent of African and Mesopotamian buildings, the sun-scorched earth. In Pasolini’s film, the tawdry, ancient colouratura is obliterated. The post-archaic world in which the tragedy takes place is stripped of its stereotypical ‘Greekness’. Nothing human is left in the landscape except human tragedy, nothing but the ‘universal community of guilt’. This dehumanised scene carries Oedipus, the wanderer. […] The Sun’s scorching heat brings the deepest secrets of human destiny out of the darkness, blinding and covering them anew; it leaves behind only madness and scorched pupils.

Gdy bezlitosne słońce pustyni stoi w zenicie in: Kino według Marii Janion, p. 35.

Examining paintings, reflective or superficial, is a thoroughly contemporary invention. The activity is built on notions that are opaque, hidden in ‘packaging’ made of culture, complex and understandable only at a certain stage of cultural development. Homer in front of Edward Hopper’s paintings would not only not have experienced the pleasure of their reflective or aesthetic ‘reading’ […] but he would also not see, at a very basic level of things, what a resident of New York would notice. The same applies to the reverse situation. When we look at the paintings of Homer’s era, we see representations, and thus already at the preliminary level of the classification of phenomena something decidedly different from the inhabitants of the small Greek poleis of the time.

Widok i zbliżenie. O nieoczywistości powierzchni greckiej wazy, in: Międzyliteratura…, p. 58.

A crack is a time of exile, the beginning of alegoresis: the birth of the laws of logic and transparent language. A unicorn descends the mountainside. We see him in a world where he does not exist, because he exists in it only as an image. In a place of silence, he sheds crystal tears, searching for the arrow that will end the suffering of the desecrated forest. The traces left behind flare with the light of phantasm, they are an eruption of the interior, an expression of deep emotion, of trauma, a reaction to the arrival of the time after. They indelibly point to a place of unravelling adorned with an inscription of loving renunciation…. à mon seul désir.

Łzy jednorożca. Szkic do fantazmatycznej biografii obrazu, in: Teksty Drugie, p. 243.

In an engraving by the Antwerp master Cornelis Massys Fight between beggars and beggar-women from 1539, we see a cluster of the urban poor. What can be more grotesque and ridiculous than a brawl between old men, beggars and cripples resolving into a conflict of the sexes? What could be more unsuitable as a subject of a work of art? […] The low subject here implies a ‘low’ medium, a cheap technique such as the woodcut. It does so in order to accustom us to death without undue sublimity or pathos. It is a kind of attempt to assimilate the inevitable. In another Massys engraving from 1538, a pair of dirty old beggars and cripples is dancing merrily (sic!). Here is the paradox of the vitality and perversity of Renaissance old age, for which the impossible becomes possible: grotesque in its vitality and at the same time extremely naturalistic.

Anty-Beatrycze. Studia nad kulturową historią obrazu pijanej i szalonej staruchy, p. 175.