Jean-Paul Swiatkowski

Jean-Paul Swiatkowski brings 28 years of college teaching experience, specializing in freshman and sophomore composition, developmental writing and literature courses. Since 2021, he has taught at Seminole State College, the University of Central Florida (UCF) and Valencia College. His academic career began at the age of 18 as a student tutor in the Academic Success Center (ASC) at Seminole State, where he eventually took on administrative duties, including serving as coordinator from 1996 to 2020.

Swiatkowski consistently refines his teaching practices to maintain contemporary relevance, integrating close reading, critical analysis, research and documentation into every course. A seasoned instructor in both online and in-person formats, he remains committed to growing and learning alongside his students.

His passion for literature spans all genres and historical periods. His undergraduate studies in humanities and philosophy at UCF (1996) included capstone work in romanticism, the history of Western philosophy, Asian humanities, and Greek and Roman culture, history and philosophy. He earned his master's degree in English Literature with an emphasis in literary, cultural, and textual studies from UCF in 2017. At UCF, he has taught courses such as American literature from its beginnings through the twentieth century, British literature from its origins through the late 19th century, world literature, and practical criticism.

Scholarly Specializations

• History of Western critical theory and philosophy: from ancient Greece to postmodernism, with emphasis on Hellenistic philosophy (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Cynicism, and the Socratic successors)
• British High Romanticism: Wordsworth, Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, Keats
• Theoretical approaches including Bakhtin, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, reception aesthetics/reader-response, French and German existentialism, structuralism/poststructuralism, Marxian analysis, and Queer theory
• Detailed literary studies in Shakespeare, John Donne, Zora Neale Hurston, and Chuck Palahniuk

Publication

• “The Politics of Knowledge in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide,” The Text: An International Peer Reviewed Online Journal of Language, Literature and Critical Theory, ISSN: 2581-9526, July 2021