![[Kuharski Picture]](Kuharski_AJ.JPG)
Prof. Allen James Kuharski
Chair, Department of Theater
Co-Director, Semester Abroad in Poland
Swarthmore College
Allen J. Kuharski was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 9, 1958. He is a fourth-generation Polish American on his father’s side, and a descendent of the mid-nineteenth-century Polish immigration from Poznan and Wielkopolska (then under Prussian rule) to central Wisconsin, where they homesteaded beginning in the 1850s in Green Lake County. His paternal grandparents were both American-born and spoke and wrote Polish as their first language as a result of the bilingual parochial schools that long existed in the Wisconsin towns of Princeton and Berlin. His father Chester was a radio and television engineer, educated at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His mother was a high school teacher, also educated at UW-Madison.
Kuharski graduated from Monona Grove High School in 1976, where he was chosen as a National Merit Finalist and as class valedictorian. He attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1976 to 1981, where he graduated with honors and distinction in Theater & Drama (with emphases in scenography and comparative drama), in addition to being elected to the UW's Iron Cross Society, Phi Eta Sigma, and Phi Beta Kappa. He began his studies of Polish language and literature at UW-Madison with Prof. Lillian B. Vallee, the distinguished translator of contemporary Polish literature who had been Czeslaw Milosz’s doctoral student and protge at Berkeley in the 1970s. At Wisconsin, Allen also completed a senior honors thesis in scenography on the subject of Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera Diably z Loudun (The Devils of Loudun). He received a Fulbright Scholarship to study scenography under Jozef Szajna at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the Fall of 1981, and was in Poland during the declaration of martial law in December of that year.
Kuharski began graduate studies in the director/scholar program Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, where he continued his study of Polish language and literature and received his M.A. in 1986 and his Ph.D. in 1991. His masters thesis in Dramatic Art at Berkeley consisted of directing and designing the Bay Area premiere of Tadeusz Rozewicz’s Biale malzenstwo (White Marriage) and he subsequently wrote the first doctoral dissertation in any language devoted to the work of Witold Gombrowicz as a playwright. While in the San Francisco Bay Area, he designed or directed over 30 theater and opera productions and began to publish his first translations, reviews, and scholarly articles in the U.S. and Poland. Both his production work and his writing attracted the attention of the Polish emigre critic Jan Kott, who subsequently became one of Kuharski’s closest colleagues and supporters.
In 1990, Kuharski was hired to teach in the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College, outside Philadelphia. He became chairman of the Department in 1998, and co-founded Swarthmore’s semester-abroad programs in Poland in theater, dance, and environmental studies in 1999. To date, the Swarthmore semester-abroad programs have generated three Fulbright scholars to Poland, with a fourth currently listed as an alternate for 2005-06. At Swarthmore, Kuharski has overseen student productions of Witkiewicz's Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen), Gombrowicz's Iwona, Ksiezniczka Burgunda (Ivona, Princess of Burgundia), and Ansky's Dybbuk. He has also organized residencies and performances at Swarthmore by Slaski Teatr Tanca (Silesian Dance Theater) of Bytom and Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr of Lublin, as well as four national tours to date by Teatr Provisorium & Kompania Teatr, including two critically-acclaimed runs in New York City and Los Angeles. Kuharski’s English-language version of Provisorium & Kompania's stage adaptation of Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke was awarded a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh in 2001, and was a finalist for the Paszport Polityki Award in Poland that same year.
In 2002, Kuharski served as the dramaturg for the East Coast/Philadelphia professional premiere of Gombrowicz's Ivona, Princess of Burgundia at Theater Exile and was named Zasluzony dla kultury polskiej (Order of Merit for Polish Culture) by the Polish Minister of Culture, Wojciech Dabrowski. In 2004, he served as dramaturg for Pig Iron Theatre Company of Philadelphia’s production of Hell Meets Henry Halfway, a stage adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Opetani (Possessed), which has been successfully performed in Philadelphia, Princeton, New York City, Cambridge (MA), Kaunas (Lithuania), Warsaw, and Lublin. Hell Meets Henry Haflway was recently awarded a Special Citation at the 2005 OBIE Awards in New York City. The production will be revived in Philadelphia in Spring 2006, and is scheduled to go on to both national and international tours thereafter.
Allen Kuharski co-founded Periphery: A Journal of Polish Affairs with editor Tadeusz Witkowski in 1994, and has also served as Associate Editor and Performance Review Editor and for Theatre Journal and Slavic and East European Performance. He is also a co-editor for Witold Gombrowicz: Pisma Wybrane, a 16-volume series being published by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Krakow. He was a member of the international planning committee for the Gombrowicz Centennial Year in 2004. His articles, translations, reviews, and interviews have been widely published in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Poland. He has translated works by Jan Kott, Witold Gombrowicz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Eugene Ionesco.
From: Resume (2005)