Professor Dorota Filipczak In Memoriam

The plan had been that we would meet in Autumn 2020 at the biennial conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture1 in Chester, close to the English/Welsh border. I was excited because Dorota had promised to present a paper on Ariana Grande and her 2018 music video, “God Is a Woman.”2 Of course, the conference was then postponed because of COVID-19, and, sadly, we never met in person again. And yet, as an academic, she has given me the means to “keep company” with her, through memories of course but also, wonderfully, through her scholarly publications. In 2019, when we first spoke about Ariana Grande, Dorota was at work on another article for the Text Matters journal (“Made to Connive”), addressing the influence of popular culture on women, adding to her existing work on the theme. She had long been interested in the impact of popular cultural forms and, particularly, the impact of western tropes in post-Soviet Poland. Growing up in Poland under a communist government, she welcomed new possibilities when they came—not least, the personal and professional rewards of building friendship networks and travelling across former boundaries. At the same time, she was also aware of the potential for sexism and misogyny to insinuate their way back into seemingly liberated lives, “now that we are inundated with the icons of American mass culture, and Polish glossies for ladies are marketing the woman as a product” (“Autonomy and Female Spirituality” 213). As she said: