Maria Birkenmajer (1942-2021)

Maria Anna Birkenmajer, always known as Marysia, was born in Kraków on 24 September 1942 as the third daughter of the eminent historian and bibliologist Professor Aleksander Birkenmajer and his wife Antonina. In 1951 the family moved to Warsaw where Marysia completed her schooling at the General Lycée No. 18 (the renowned “Zamoyski”). She went on to study at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, then located on the main campus, and was employed there after her graduation.

Initially, she was a member of the Institute’s Department of English and American Literature, where she was planning a doctoral dissertation on the reception of English literature in Poland between 1918 and 1932 (Dziedzic, 64–65). Her research field was the Polish reception of James Joyce. The thesis was to be part of a broader Reception Studies project comparing the dominant tendencies in British and American literature with their Polish counterparts of the respective period. Regrettably, despite having collected the data about some 600 English books translated and edited in interwar Poland, the project never came to fruition.

Having moved to the Institute’s Department of Applied Linguistics, Maria Birkenmajer accompanied Professor Jan Rusiecki in the founding of IATEFL Poland (Stowarzyszenie Nauczycieli Języka Angielskiego w Polsce), established in 1992. She was its second President and board member. After her retirement from the Institute, she taught Academic Writing at the Warsaw branch of the Łódź University of Social Sciences (SAN) until January 2017.

Her first husband was Stanisław Michałowicz, with whom she had a daughter Klaudyna, also a graduate of our Institute; her second marriage was to Robert Lindsay Hodgart, since December 1991 using the surname Birkenmajer-Hodgart. She died on 7 July 2021 in Warsaw and was buried in the family grave in Kraków.

She was an outstanding teacher of English as a foreign language, pioneering the study of Business English at the Institute of English Studies immediately following the democratic changes occasioned by the fall of communism in Poland. Her Academic Writing courses equipped a few generations of future scholars with vital skills. She wrote several TEFL textbooks, which ran into many editions.

She will always be remembered as a person of great personal culture and integrity; a true lady.A former student, Monika Śmiałkowska (Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne) remembers: “As an undergraduate, I had the great privilege of being taught Academic Writing by Maria Birkenmajer. It is not an exaggeration to say that this experience laid the foundations for my subsequent academic career. Ms Birkenmajer’s underlying rule was to write clearly and logically. I will never forget when she told us to do that, and one creatively-minded student said plaintively: ‘But we want to surprise you!’ Ms Birkenmajer’s response was: ‘Yes, but surprise me clearly and logically.’ I wish that my students had somebody like her to teach them what sounds so simple but is so difficult to achieve in practice”.

Klaudyna Michałowicz and Dorota Babilas