Mission Statement
Polish Gothic is dedicated to exploring the gothic sensibility as a critical method for reading the complexities of contemporary life. The project approaches the gothic not as a genre but as an epistemic modality—a way of attending to instability, affect, and the spectral forces that shape cultural experience.
Drawing on hauntology, queer theory, postsecular thought, and anthropologies of the specter, Polish Gothic examines how the uncanny, the excessive, and the unresolved operate within everyday structures of meaning. Within this frame, the gothic sensibility functions as a diagnostic tool for identifying the spectral architectures that underlie contemporary life—the traces of what has been repressed, forgotten, or rendered invisible, yet continues to exert force.
The magazine serves as a platform for experimental, hybrid, and theoretically engaged work that interrogates the boundaries between presence and absence, normativity and its fractures, the sacred and the secular, the personal and the political. Through this lens, Polish Gothic seeks to illuminate the hauntings that persist within modernity and to cultivate new modes of reading, writing, and thinking attuned to the spectral.
Our mission is to foster a space where emerging and established voices can engage with the gothic as a living, critical practice—one capable of revealing the hidden intensities, contradictions, and returns that structure the world we inhabit.
Polish Gothic: Tracing the spectral architectures of the present
Polish Gothic positions the gothic sensibility within a field of unstable ontologies, affective disturbances, and spectral relations. Its first issue (University of Gdańsk 2022) serves as an initial point of entry into a broader topology in which text, affect, and the specter operate as interdependent regimes of knowledge. In this configuration, the gothic is not a genre but an epistemic modality—a way of understanding how presence is constituted through absence, how normativity reveals itself through its queer fractures, and how cultural meaning emerges from what resists stabilization.
From a hauntological perspective, the gothic becomes a practice of reading the trace. Following Derrida, the specter is not a metaphorical embellishment but an ontological condition: that which interrupts the binary of presence and absence while enabling a nonlinear experience of time. Hauntology foregrounds the persistence of what should no longer be present — the return of discarded histories, unresolved affects, and cultural residues that continue to shape the present. Within this frame, the gothic sensibility functions as a diagnostic tool for identifying the spectral architectures that underlie contemporary life.
In the context of queer gothic, the project foregrounds the gothic as a site of destabilized subjectivities and non‑normative embodiments. Queerness is not an optional lens but a structural feature of the gothic’s capacity to unsettle. The gothic exposes the fragility of heteronormative narratives by revealing the performative, contingent, and often uncanny nature of identity. Desire becomes a site of disorientation; the body becomes a locus of excess; community becomes a space of ambivalent belonging. The queer gothic thus operates as a critique of the naturalized, the stable, and the coherent — insisting instead on fluidity, rupture, and the generative potential of the strange.
A postsecular approach to the gothic highlights the persistence of the sacred within ostensibly secular cultural formations. Rather than framing religion and secularity as oppositional, the postsecular gothic reveals their mutual entanglement. The sacred returns not as transcendence but as affective residue: a pulse, a disturbance, a remainder that unsettles rationalist narratives of modernity. Ritual, belief, and the uncanny converge in forms that resist easy categorization. The gothic becomes a space where the metaphysical and the material coexist, where spiritual intensities manifest as spectral presences, and where the boundaries between the sacred and the everyday blur.
Drawing on anthropologies of the specter, the project treats the gothic as a method for examining what societies repress, marginalize, or refuse to acknowledge. Following thinkers such as Avery Gordon, the specter becomes a figure of social haunting—a sign of unresolved violence, unprocessed histories, and the lingering presence of those excluded from dominant narratives. The gothic sensibility, in this sense, is a mode of cultural analysis that attends to what returns because it has not been properly addressed. It reveals the ghostly infrastructures of social life: the absences that act, the silences that speak, the forgotten that insist on being remembered.
The first issue of 2022 can be understood as an initial experiment within this conceptual architecture—a testing ground for hybrid forms that treat the gothic as a laboratory of affects, traces, and disturbances. Subsequent development of the project extends this logic, positioning Polish Gothic as a platform for exploring the gothic sensibility as a critical method for reading contemporary culture. In a moment when linear narratives of progress falter and cultural memory becomes increasingly spectral, the gothic offers a vocabulary for articulating the uncertainties, intensities, and hauntings that shape the present.
Issue 2025/01 (release: 13 December 2025) centers on the concept of loyalty. Approached through hauntological, queer, and postsecular frameworks, loyalty emerges as a fundamentally ambivalent structure—a site of negotiation between obligation and desire, between community and autonomy, between memory and its spectral recurrence. Rather than a stable commitment, loyalty appears as a shifting terrain marked by tensions, ruptures, and returns. It is a figure that both binds and destabilizes, revealing the fragility of the relations it seeks to secure.
In this expanded configuration, Polish Gothic becomes a space for theorizing the gothic sensibility as a mode of inquiry attuned to spectrality, instability, and affective complexity. It is a project that does not merely describe the gothic but mobilizes it as a method for thinking the contemporary—its hauntings, its fractures, its queer intensities, and its postsecular resonances.
Polish Gothic: Where affect, absence, and the spectral converge
Polish Gothic is a literary magazine, designed and established in 2022, at the University of Gdańsk, with an original aim to present student creative engagement in English.
We are interested in the uncanny, in narratives that are both excessive and insightful, engaging and discerning, while never ceasing to be playful and entertaining.
The June edition of 2022 was our summer pilot presentation.
We are also happy to announce that at this point the magazine is expanding.
Our new 2025/01 issue appears on December 13th, 2025. This issue centers on the word loyalty—a concept that opens into questions of choice, demand, duty, betrayal, and the shifting terrain of freedom.
After a long pause, we are gathering again—this time with new voices, new collaborators, and a shared desire to explore the gothic as it lives in our daily encounters.
The 2025/01 issue authors:
Aris Kowalski
I am a third year English Philology student at the University of Gdansk, hoping to work as a translator in the near future. I am twenty years old and my journey with writing began almost ten years ago. I have written in both Polish and English, and I still have plenty of ideas in the back of my head. I would love to put them into words that actually make sense for others to (hopefully) enjoy as well.
Paulina Jakimowicz
I study Polish Philology at the University of Gdańsk. Sometimes I write articles for Uślicznienie and edit for Dzieła cytowane. I wrote and directed the play Nie lubiem teatru with my fellow graduates from Zarządzanie Instytucjami Artystycznymi. I’ve always been a fan of the strange, the surreal, and the scary.
Adrian Kafarski
I have been writing for four years, focusing on dark, tragic prose in English for the last two. My main passion is analyzing pop song lyrics, which heavily influences the rhythm and emotion of my work as well as it serves as a plot inspiration. Though I also write poetry, it’s my prose I use to explore darker themes, such as sacrifice and ambition. With my stories I usually opt for a plot twist; one that you don’t see coming, yet serves as a missing piece of a bigger picture.
Kamil Mania
I was born in Ruda Śląska, Silesian Voivodeship, in 2005. I attended Szkoła Podstawowa nr 24 im. ks. Lexa in Ruda Śląska, and later II Liceum Ogólnokształcące z Oddziałami Dwujęzycznymi im. Gustawa Morcinka, also in Ruda Śląska. After moving to the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship, I began my studies at the University of Gdańsk, enrolling in American Studies. I am currently a second year BA student.
Katarzyna ‘Catharsis’ Mikołajczyk
Hauntingly invested in horror and beyond, I am a personification of the essence of the Greek theatre, always chasing transformative experiences in everything around me, both comedic and tragic. My interests include video games, musicals, horror movies, and a music taste that ranges from K-pop to metal. Perpetually haunted by ghosts—my favorite movie is Scream, my favorite band is Ghost, and my Dead by Daylight favorite is Ghostface, with yet another Ghost close to my heart.
Oliwia Sewastynowicz
I have always been a better writer than talker; words behave for me only when caged on a page. Ever since I began writing as a child, I have been drawn to stories that linger in the shadows, growing more and more fascinated by the unnamed, the uncanny, the unknown. A lot of my works gravitate towards those quiet, uneasy spaces, and I am most at home when a story whispers, rather than declares, inviting the reader to imagine what lurks just out of sight.
Sarah Flamminio
The new CfP has been released on December 20, 2025.
Please refer to our Submission section for Submission Guidelines. Contact for general queries: editor.polishgothic@ug.edu.pl
Institute of English and American Studies
University of Gdańsk
ul. Wita Stwosza 51, room 384
80-308 Gdańsk
Wydawca: Uniwersytet Gdański, ul. Bażyńskiego 8, 80-309 Gdańsk