We are sad to report that Professor Dorota Filipczak, Head of the Department of Intermedial, Canadian and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland, has died. From almost the beginning, since she came as a visiting scholar to the University of Durham in the late 1980s, Dorota has been a supporter of the biennial conferences of the Society and also of Literature and Theology. In the early days of the Journal she was a key figure in developing its European and international connections. For the past ten years she has acted a founding Editor of the journal Text Matters, based in her own university at Lodz.
Dorota was a scholar who was wide-ranging and exploratory in her interests, from an early concern for Canadian literature (the subject of her doctoral thesis) to later encouragement of feminist studies. In 2001 she edited a volume of essays entitled Dissolving the Boundaries, published by the University of Lodz that included essays by her close friend, the late Pamela Sue Anderson, Alastair Hunter of the University of Glasgow, and Hugh Pyper, then teaching in the University of Leeds. The book started life in a conference which Dorota organised, bringing to her university participants from the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, the USA and Poland. In her quiet, persistent way, Dorota did so much to encourage international scholarship in the field of literature and religion, dissolving boundaries and cementing friendships.
She was a faithful and devoted scholar and friend and she will be sadly missed.
David Jasper
Alison Jasper