Mary Orsak
(University of Oxford)

20 May 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA project Slovak Literature in Inter-Literary and Transcultural Contexts.

This seminar will explore the American poet, essayist, and feminist Adrienne Rich’s seminal work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution (1976), which distinguishes between “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction—and to children; and the institution—which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control” (13). The seminar will examine how effectively Rich’s interrogations of motherhood function in other contexts, particularly in Czech, Slovak, and Russian literature of the 1990s.

Mary Orsak is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on contemporary Czech, Slovak, and Russian literature. She has written two chapters on Milan Kundera in Milan Kundera: Known and Unknown (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Modern Czech Literature: Writing in Times of Political Trauma (Vernon Press, 2025).