Animal Adaptations

28/09/2026

On September 27th, our team had the pleasure to present our project for the general audience as a part of Warsaw's annual Festival of Science.

We discussed the general idea behind our project and then moved on to individual case studies. Justyna Wlodarczyk talked about the use of dog actors in silent adaptations of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (dir. William Robert Daly, 1914 & dir. Harry Pollard, 1927), specifically the motivations behind adding dogs to the narrative. Kamil Chrzczonowicz discussed the ethics of handling and training elephant actors behind the scenes of Douglas Gordon's "Zenobia" (1939). Jack Harrison explored how adapting canine sound necessitated changes to the story itself in Richard Thorpe's "The Voice of Bugle Ann" (1936). Julia Wilde presented the various challenges faced during the shooting of Clarence Brown's "The Yearling" (1946) as the production had to adjust to the growth and reproduction cycles of deer, whereas Anna Potoczny talked about the making of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963) and how knowing what we know about the handling of bird actors may influence how we interpret the cinematic text.

We would like to kindly thank our audience for showing up on such a beautiful Sunday morning, and we hope to be back soon with another public talk.

10/09/2026

In August, Justyna Wlodarczyk and Asia Ziarkowska from of our team had the pleasure of visiting two archives: the University of Oregon and Boise State University.

The University of Oregon Special Collections and Archives has particularly strong holdings in children’s literature and cinema studies—which happens to be exactly what we needed for this project.

Read more below 👇

As a part of our research project, we had the pleasure to explore The University of Oregon Special Collections and Archives, specifically the Vance J. Hoyt collection and the Scott O’Dell papers. They yielded extraordinary findings regarding the process of adapting animals for the silver screen.

10/08/2026

Summer has brought about some truly exciting developments in our research on animals characters in film adaptations 🎬🐕

In May, Justyna Wlodarczyk was able to travel to New York City, where she viewed the 1923 silent “The Call of the Wild” at the Museum of Modern Art, and to Washington, D.C., where she viewed the 1925 “Baree” starring Anita Stewart. “Baree” is the film that she helped uncover and which has now been graciously preserved by the Library of Congress.

Somewhat ironically, however, it was the 1923 “The Call of the Wild,” rather than the long-awaited “Baree,” that made the greater impression on her.

Moreover, in July, Justyna and Jack Harrison took part in the conference of the Association of Adaptation Studies, which this year featured a theme ideally suited to both Jack’s interests and Justyna’s work on silent cinema: “Adaptation and Aurality.”

Find out more below 👇

In May, our Principal Investigator Justyna was able to travel to New York City, where she viewed the 1923 silent  The Call of the Wild  at the Museum of Modern Art, and to Washington, D.C., where she viewed the 1925  Baree  starring Anita Stewart.  Bare

03/08/2026

We have closed the call for papers for the upcoming volume Animal Adaptations, which will be co-edited by Justyna Wlodarczyk from our own team and Michael Fuchs from the University of Innsbruck.

We are thrilled (and somewhat surprised) by the interest the CFP generated, and we are sorry to have had to turn down so many exciting proposals due to lack of space. We are beyond excited about the team of authors who have agreed to contribute. The response suggests that we have managed to identify a timely topic that scholars are actively thinking about and believe deserves further exploration.

We’ll keep you posted as our work on the project progresses.

The volume will be related to this project but broader in scope: we have secured contributions that explore not only book-to-film adaptations but also the various transmedial circulations and transformations of animal life. It will bring animal studies into dialogue with adaptation and transmedia st

30/04/2026

We're absolutely thrilled to share a one-of-a-kind discovery made by Justyna Wlodarczyk 🥳

As we delve ever further into the growing corpus of book-to-film adaptations that form the basis of our research, it has become increasingly apparent that a troubling number of silent films featuring animal protagonists have not survived the passage of time. Many of these works are now classified as missing—presumed lost to nitrate decay, neglect, or the contingencies of early film history.

However, owing to Justyna's efforts, the world of silent film has regained a production long considered lost.

Read more under the link in the comments 👇

27/04/2026

CFP alert!

One of the planned results of our project is going to be an edited volume that expands on its scope by going beyond book-to-film adaptations. The volume will be co-edited by Justyna and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck) and will be available open-access. Have a look at the CfP and contact us if you're interested in contributing.

We invite proposals for a small number of additional chapters for an edited volume on animal adaptations, edited by Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) and Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck). The volume grows out of the project “Animal Adaptations” (funded by Poland’s National Scie...

02/12/2025

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.

01/12/2025

Say hello to another member of our team 🥳 Meet Asia!

Joanna Ziarkowska is an Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of “Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes: Biomedicalization and Embodied Resistance in Native American Literature” (2021) and the co-editor of ”In Other Words: Dialogizing Postcoloniality, Race, and Ethnicity” (2012). She has published several articles and chapters on Native American literature and medical humanities. Her recent article, “Shaping Indian biocitizens: Americanisation through medical education in the TB sanatorium paper Sioux San Sun (1938–1941),” was published in Medical Humanities.

She teaches courses on Indigenous literatures, medical humanities, and film studies at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. She does her best to provide exquisite service to her three cats – Kazia, Batman, and Łatka. She identifies as CCL (crazy cat lady).

27/11/2025

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.

26/11/2025

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).