The author of a book on Poland's revered Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, and his travels as a political exile will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in the Frederick Douglass Building on the University of Rochester's River Campus. The lecture and reception following the talk are free and open to the public.

In her talk on "How to Travel? The East-West Encounter According to Mickiewicz," Izabela Kalinowska, assistant professor of Slavic literatures and cultures at Stony Brook University, will describe 19th-century Polish and Russian literary accounts and how different Slavic cultures reveal their views of the Orient. She is the author of the recent book Between East and West: Polish and Russian 19th-Century Travel to the Orient (University of Rochester Press, 2004).

The event is part of the Skalny Lecture and Artist Series and co-sponsored by the Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies and the Russian Studies Program at the University of Rochester, and the University of Rochester Press. The lecture and reception will be held in the ballroom of The Meliora on the fourth floor of the Frederick Douglass Building.

Kalinowska received her master's degree in English philology from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, and a doctoral degree in Slavic literatures from Yale University. She specializes in Polish and Russian 19th-century literatures and in East-Central European cinema.

Between East and West is part of the Rochester Studies in Central Europe series, which is published by the University of Rochester Press. Ewa Hauser, director of the Skalny Center, is the senior editor of the series.