Zofia Pigoń is a teaching assistant in the Department of English Literature at the Institute of English Studies. She is a double graduate of the Master’s studies at the University of Wrocław. In 2022, she received a Master’s degree in French philology, with her thesis supervised by professor Maja Pawłowska and focused on the theme of longing in the letters of Madame de Sévigné. In 2024, she received a Master’s degree in English philology. Her second thesis, supervised by professor Wojciech Drąg, concerned the cruelty of nature in the selected works of Thomas Hardy (these being The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native and Two on a Tower). The thesis received recognition in the Excellence in Students’ Research competition. In 2025 she began her doctoral studies at the University of Wrocław. The subject of her PhD thesis will concern the depiction of the world of nature in the novels by Thomas Hardy, set against the philosophical thought of Gaston Bachelard.

Her academic interests centre around 19th-century literature, particularly the works of Thomas Hardy, as well as the depiction of nature, folklore and the supernatural.

She took part in the Erasmus programme at the University of Lille in 2021 and at the University of Le Mans in 2023.

Articles in journals:

Pigoń, Zofia. Unearthly Nature: The Strangeness of Arbospaces in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders. Text Matters 14, 2024: 433-450.

Pigoń, Zofia. Of Trees and Men: Arboreal Kinship in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders and George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Orbis Linguarum 59, 2025.

Conference papers:

„Surveiller et punir : le problème des violences policières en France”, students’ conference at the Institute of Romance Philology: „Le citoyen moderne : entre les contraints du système et la liberté du choix”, 26.05.2021;

„Francuski szyk na polskich ulicach”, students’ conference at  the Institute of Romance Philology: „Różne oblicza Francji w kontekście wielokulturowości”, 17.05.2019.