 |
Petr A. Bílek is a professor of modern Czech literature and literary theory at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University in Prague and professor of popular culture history and theory and the chair of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Czech Republic. He is the author of six books on literature and culture and co-author/editor of the other five books. He spent years 1994-97 and 2000 as a visiting professor and Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Brown University, Providence, His publications also include essays on Milan Kundera in the context of contemporary Czech literature and in the context of Central European modernism, on the image of the City of Prague in literature and on contemporary Czech poetry. He also edited a collective monograph on James Bond and his Czech Communist replica and a book on Czech official culture of late Communist era. His essays written in English appeared in a book form as Models of Representation in Czech Literary History (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2010, with V. Papoušek; ENG) and as Literary Universe in Three Parts: Language – Fiction – Experience (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2018, with V. Papoušek and D. Skalický; ENG). His essays have been published in distinctive countries in more than ten languages.
|
|
Blanka Činátlová received her PhD from the Charles University in Prague, where she studied cultural theory and Czech language and literature at the Faculty of Arts. Her dissertation explored the topic of corporeality in literature and was published in a revised form as The Story of the Body (Pistorius & Olšanská, 2009; CZE). She is the author of a collection of studies entitled Odradek. The Thing and Materiality in Literature (Pistorius & Olšanská, 2015). Together with Petr A. Bílek, she edited a collection of essays on Czechoslovak pop culture during the normalization period, The Tesil Cavalry: Pop Culture Images of Normalization (2010; CZE). Her research focuses mainly on Central European literature, and the intersections of comparative literature and cultural anthropology (e.g. the transformation of myth and mythologies in modern literature). She is currently writing a study about the effects of the approach inspired by visual anthropology on traditional literary studies. She is also involved in the didactics of literature and teaches seminars on critical writing. Since 2010, she has been the literary editor of the A2 magazine, where she tries to introduce students of comparative studies to the publishing practice. |
|
 |
Libuše Heczková is Head of the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Her main fields of interests include literature and cultural history of the 20th century, gender studies, literary theory and didactics of literature. She is the author or co-author of four books on modern literature, history and feminism, including Indispensable, Defamed, Liberating: On Women’s Work (with Marie Bahenská and Dana Musilová; 2017; CZE), “No Branch of Science is Closed to Women by Nature”. Women’s Convoluted Path to Scientific Career in the first half of the 20TH Century (with Marie Bahenská and Dana Musilová, 2023; CZE); and Writing Minervas: Chapters from Czech Literary Critique (2009), and she collaborates on the project The Civilized Woman (main author Martina Pachmanová, 2021), and co-author of the four-volume history of the 20th century Czech literature History of New/”New” Modernism (2010–2022; CZE). She also edited numerous volumes, most recently on Božena Němcová (2021) and Eliška Krásnohorská (2019), she is an editor and founder the journal Slovo a smysl/Word and Sense. Journal of Unterdisciplinary Theory and Criticism in the Czech Studies. Recently she collaborates on the European project of Faculty of Arts Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building. She coordinates the international double degree PhD programm Germanoslavistics together with University Sapienza Roma.
|
|
Jiří Holý studied Czech Studies and German Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He has worked as a proofreader and editor in the Československý spisovatel publishing house. From 1982 to 1997, he has worked at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences as a graduate student, researcher and later head of Department of Theory. Since 1997, he has been teaching at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University where he was appointed Professor of Czech literature. He has worked at a number of foreign universities, spent 10 semesters as a visiting professor at the universities of Vienna, Regensburg and Berlin. In 1998, he has co-founded the Česká knižnice (Czech Library) edition of literary works, in which 110 volumes have been published so far. He is the founder of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Literature (2010). Professionally, Milan Jankovič and Zdeněk Kožmín have influenced him the most. He mainly deals with modern Czech literature, Jewish themes in Central European literatures and reflections on the Shoah. He has published seven individual monographs in Czech, two in German and one in English, more than 100 contributions in monographs and dictionaries as well as 80 studies in professional journals. Of these, he considers to be the most important: the handbook Česká literatura od počátků k dnešku (together with Jan Lehár, Alexander Stich and Jaroslava Janáčková, for the first time published in 1998; CZE), the Czech adaptation of Lexikon teorie literatury a kultury (with Jiří Trávníček, 2006; CZE), the more than one thousand-page publication Cizí i blízcí: Židé, literatura, kultura v českých zemích ve 20. století (ed. JH, eight co-authors, 2016; CZE) and Handbook of Polish, Czech and Slovak Holocaust Fiction. Works and Contexts (ed. together with Elisa-Maria Hiemer, Agata Firlej and Hana Nichtburgerová; ENG). Currently is preparing to research Yiddish literature in the Czech Lands and Central Europe as well as project researching intertextuality in the Holocaust literature. |
|
|
|
Josef Hrdlička studied Czech language and literature and philosophy at the Charles University, where he continued his doctoral studies. His revised dissertation was published under the title Images of the World in Czech Literature: Studies on the Modes of the Whole: Komenský, Mácha, Šlejhar, Weiner (Malvern, 2008, in Czech). He made his living as a translator, worked at the National Library of the Czech Republic and since 2010 has been teaching comparative studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. His professional interests include poetry theory, comparative literature, world literature and ecocriticism. In 2017 he published a collection of studies on poetry and poetics, Poetry and the Cosmos (Malvern, in Czech), and in 2020 a monograph, Poetry in Exile. Czech Poets during the Cold War and the Western Poetic Tradition (Karolinum, Czech and English versions). He has long collaborated with students and PhD students of the Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature on radio programmes and collective publications mostly devoted to poetry (Poems and Places, 2015, co-edited with Klára Soukupová and Michal Špína; Heroes in Poems, 2017, co-edited with Matouš Jaluška; Things in Poems, 2020, co-edited with Martin Pšenička, English version 2022 with Mariana Machová; On the Borders of Similarity: Czech Poetry after 1945 in Comparative Perspective, 2022, co-edited with Eliška Härtelová). He is editor of the academic journal World of Literature and co-editor of Studia poetica, an edition devoted to theoretical texts on poetry. Together with Sylva Fischerová, he organizes the annual reading of poets at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. He has published three collections of poetry and one collection of essays connected with poems, and occasionally teaches seminars on creative writing.
|
|
Andrea Králíková graduated in Czech language and literature at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where she also completed her doctoral studies in the History of Czech Literature and Literary Theory. Her dissertation was published under the title Authorial Faces in Book Mirrors (Images of Authors of Contemporary Czech Literature in Cultural Transfer) (Příbram, Pistorius & Olšanská, 2015; CZE). During her doctoral studies, she worked as a lecturer at the University of Konstanz. Her professional activities focus on contemporary literature and the situation of Czech literature after 1989. One of her areas of interest is didactics of literature, education and training of future Czech language teachers. At the beginning of her professional career, she focused on construction of tests and assessment of written expression of secondary school students. She also lectures courses on contemporary literature for secondary school teachers. She is a member of the board of the Centre for Teacher Education at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (since 2021), Cooperatio (Language and Literature Education, since 2022).
|
 |
 |
Eva Krásová studied philosophy and Czech language and literature at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, where she also completed her doctoral studies. Her doctoral thesis was devoted to the thought of Émile Benveniste and his role in the birth of French and Czech structuralism (Émile Benveniste a úloha smyslu [Émile Benveniste and the Role of Meaning], Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2015; CZE). Together with Tomáš Koblížek, she has also published a collection of Émile Benveniste’s studies (Studie z obecné lingvistiky, Dauphin, 2015; CZE). She has a long-standing interest in the history of thinking about 20th century literature, with an emphasis on French theory and the revision of its sources. Her methodological approach can be characterized as a modern conception of intellectual history with an emphasis on the use of archival documents and manuscript sources, as well as digital discourse analysis. She has also been involeved pedagogically in university programs of creative writing, first at the Josef Škvorecký Literary Academy, and from 2015 to the present at the Program of Lycics and Script at the Jaroslav Ježek Academy of Higher Education, where she has the opportunity to meet young poets in the nascent stage. Her latest professional interest is the analysis of popular culture using the tools of classical narratology and tropology and the resulting reflections on the place of literature and its plots in the contemporary media situation.
|
|
Luboš Merhaut, literary historian, editor and lexicographer. After studying at the Faculty of Education at Charles University, he worked from 1987–2010 at the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS in Prague (since 1992 researcher, in 2003–2009 head of the Department of History of Czech Literature and Lexicography), where he was, among others, author and editor of the Lexicon of Czech Literature (also as chief editor of the 4th volume, 2008). In 2009 he received the Magnesia Litera Prize for contribution to Czech Literature for the preparation of the Lexicon of Czech Literature (with Vladimír Forst and Jiří Opelík and a team of collaborators). Since 2006 he has been working at the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, where he was habilitated in 2021; he is a member of the editorial board of the journal Slovo a smysl / Word & Sense. In 2010, he was one of the founders of the Institute for the Study of Literature, o. p. s. He is mainly interested in the literature of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, issues of modernism and polemics, and the history of Czech literary history. He has published the monographs The Paths of Stylization (1994; CZE) and The Paths of Polemics (2021; CZE) and the study The Books of Josef Čapek on Art (2013); he is co-author of In Morbid Colours: Art and the Idea of Decadence in the Bohemian Lands 1880–1914 (2006; CZE), Culture and Totalitarianism I–IV (2013–17; CZE), Klubko Ariadnino (2014; CZE), Politicians, Artists and Scientists in Public Space at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries (2015; CZE). He is co-organizer of the collections Modern Review 1894–1925 (1995), „On the Subject of Art and Life“: F. X. Šalda 1867–1937–2007. He has edited the anthologies Readings about Jaroslav Hašek (2014) and Readings about T. G. Masaryk (with Lucie Merhautová, 2017) and the set of Criticism and Essays from 1892–1924 by Arnošt Procházka (2020), and as an editor he has contributed to the Writings of Arthur Breisky, Josef Čapek, F. X. Šalda and T. G. Masaryk. |
 |
 |
Josef Šebek graduated in Czech language and literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His dissertation was published under the title Literature and the Social: Bourdieu, Williams and their Successors (2019; CZE). In 2016–2018 he was a researcher at the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS, since 2017 he has been a member of the Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (since 2019 assistant professor). Since 2022 he has been an associated researcher at CEFRES. He specializes in cultural materialism, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and current French sociology of literature. With Richard Müller, he published Texts in Circulation: Anthology of Cultural Materialist Approaches to Literature (2014; CZE). More recently he also began to work on discourse theory, contemporary rhetoric, and media theory of literature (esp. as the co-author of Beyond Media Contours: Literature and Mediality; Richard Müller, Tomáš Chudý et al., 2020; English version will be published in 2024 by Bloomsbury). His other interests include genres of life writing and queer studies. He tries to interconnect and integrate these approaches in his essays on Czech, French, and other literatures. He has contributed to handbooks in the field and he is also a translator and editor, esp. managing editor of the journal Slovo a smysl / Word & Sense and a member of the editorial team of Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics.
|
|
Marie Škarpová graduated in Czech language and literature and music education from Masaryk University in Brno and in Catholic theology from Palacký University in Olomouc. She published her Ph.D. thesis under the title „Mezi Čechy, k pobožnému zpívání náchylnými“. Šteyerův Kancionál český, kanonizace hymnografické paměti a utváření katolické identity [“Among the Czechs, prone to devotional singing”. Šteyer’s Czech Hymnbook, Canonizations of Hymnography Memory, and Performances of Catholic Identity] (Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2015; CZE). In 2006–2010, she worked at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences, since 2006 she has been lectured on history of Czech medieval and early modern literature at the Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (first as an external lecturer, since 2013 as an assistant professor), she also lectured on history of Czech medieval and early modern literature at Masaryk University in Brno (2001–2006) and the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice (2011–2017). Her research focuses on the literature of the Czech lands of the 16th–18th centuries, especially hagiography and hymnography, on Central European hymnbooks and on the history of Czech national philology. She is also involved in editing; in the collaboration with musicologist Tomáš Slavický and linguist Pavel Kosek, she prepared a critical edition of Czech Baroque hymnbook Jesličky. Staré nové písničky [Creche. Old New Songs] (Brno: Host – Masaryk University, 2012; CZE). She is a member of the editorial board of the “e-forum” of the Institute for the literary studies. |
 |
 |
Michael Špirit has been working at the Institute of Czech Literature and Literary Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University since 1993 (2001–2006 he worked at the Slavic Institute at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg), where he teaches courses on the history of Czech literature after 1945, textual studies and literary criticism. He has published an anthology of his criticism from 1991–2005, Počátky potíží (Beginnings of Trouble, 2006; CZE), a complex Komentář (Commentary, 2009; CZE) on the edition of the manuscript of J. Škvorecký’s novel The Cowards, a monograph on the questions of variant, influence and emancipation from him, Růžena Grebeníčková a její rukopis (Růžena Grebeníčková and Her Writing, 2015; CZE), and Textologie dnes (Textology Today, 2019; CZE), which deals with the various stages of the editorial preparation of the book and the publishing projects of the last decades. From 1995–2001, he was editor of the magazine Revolver Revue and Kritická Příloha RR, and in 2010 he co-founded the Institute for the Study of Literature, to whose online column Echoes he contributed until the end of 2016. Since 2017 he has been writing for the online journal for literary science Kanon, which he also co-edits. He has prepared and extensively commented on books of prose (e.g. A. Blažíčková, J. Hanč, J. Rychlík), poetry (J. Hauková, Z. Hejda, N. Plíšková) and criticism (P. Blažíček, R. Grebeníčková, I. M. Jirous, J. Lopatka, A. Stankovič, F. X. Šalda, J. Vohryzek, anthology from the magazine Tvář). He has consistently worked on the texts of Josef Škvorecký (among others, he has edited the text of the novels Zbabělci /The Cowards, 1998, 2020/, Tankový prapor /Republic of Whores, 2011/, Příběh inženýra lidských duší /The Engineer of Human Souls, 2012, 2019/, eight books of essays). Since 2003, he has been editing and commenting on the bilingual, Czech-German writings of Vladimír Holan Gesammelte Werke (7 volumes have been published so far) with Professor Urs Heftrich of the University of Heidelberg. Since 2021, he has been managing Collected Works of Jiří Weil at the publishing house Triáda (2021–2022, where he published three volumes of the author’s reports and essays from 1920–1959).
|
|
Michal Topor studied Czech language and literature at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where he defended his dissertation on Minima prosaika. Czech minor prose in the years 1890-1900 in 2010. In 2004–2010 he worked at the Institute for Czech Literature, first as a bibliographer, and since 2008 as a member of the Department of the History of Czech Literature. Since 2010, he has been a collaborator of the Institute for the Study of Literature, and since October 2017 its director. From 2010-2017 he was the executive editor of journal Slovo a smysl / Word & Sense. Furthermore, in 2018-2023 he acted as an external lecturer at the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.and ince 2024 he has worked as an assistant professor there. His teaching and research activities focus mainly on Central European literary modernism, Czech-German literary relations and the history of literary history in the Czech lands. He is the author of Berlínské epizody. Příspěvek k dějinám filologie v Čechách a na Moravě [Berlin Episodes. A Contribution to the History of Philology in Bohemia and Moravia] (2015; CZE), co-author of the monographs Arne Laurin (1889-1945). Portrét novináře [Arne Laurin (1889-1945). Portrait of a Journalist] (2019; CZE) and Nalezen v překladu. Emil Saudek (1876–1941) [Found in Translation. Emil Saudek (1876-1941], respectively Emil Saudek (1876-1941). Ein Übersetzer und Kulturvermittler zwischen Metropole und Provinz [Emil Saudek (1876-1941). A translator and cultural mediator between metropolis and province] (both 2022; CZE, GER), edited volumes such as Cizinci – či krajané? Reflexe německojazyčných partií Čech a Moravy v textech Arneho Nováka [Foreigners – or Compatriots? Reflections on the German-speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia in the texts of Arne Novák] (2017), Arne Laurin: Dopisy [Arne Laurin: Letters] (2019) or Richard Messer. Cesta Evropou, mezi filologií a dějinami umění [Richard Messer. A Journey through Europe, between Philology and Art History] (2022).
|
 |
 |
Daniel Vojtěch studied Czech language and literature and received both his M.A. and Ph.D. at the College of Arts, Charles University. 1997-2010 he was a research fellow at the Institute of Czech Literature, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He was a member of the team of authors and editors of Lexikon české literatury (Dictionary of Czech Literature). In 1996, he was awarded the Masaryk Scholarship at SSEES (London University), in 1999, he was Jan Patočka Junior visiting Fellow at IWM in Vienna, in 2003 he was a Fulbright visiting fellow at UW Madison and in 2017/18 a Mercator fellow at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. His book on early Czech modernism and the changes of literary criticism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was published in 2008 under the title Vášeň a ideál (Passion and Ideal -> venia docendi at Jihočeská univerzita [The University of South Bohemia], České Budějovice, 2010; CZE). Since 2010 he has been teaching the topics of Czech literature in comparative contexts, methods of literary history and the history of criticism at the Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature, College of Arts, Charles University (associate professor). He focuses on the history of modern (Czech) literature, history of critical argument, the methodology of literary scholarship, the problems of intellectual history in Central Europe and the interactions between Czech and German written literatures of the Bohemian lands. He edited volumes of Jan Patočka’s essays on art and Josef Čapek’s fiction included in the projects of their collected writings.
|
|
Ondřej Vojtíšek graduated in Teaching Czech Language and Literature for Secondary Schools at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, where he also completed his doctoral studies. His dissertation (By the Paths Through the Text: Didactic Interpretation and Interpretive Tasks in Secondary School) focused on the issue of mastering and assessing the skill of interpretation of a literary text. He has contributed as a lecturer and author to the didactic materials of the Czech Academy of Sciences Seminar or Workshop of the Czech Library Edition. He has taught literature (and other subjects focused on reading comprehension) at different types of secondary schools and primary schools; since 2019, he has been teaching courses focused on particular aspects of secondary school literature teaching (interpretation of world literature, analysis of textbooks and other school manuals) and on literature for children and youth. He is also involved in other courses in literary didactics and teaching practice, as well as in the organization of informal meetings for students and graduate teachers. |
 |
|
Josef Vojvodík is a Czech theoretician and art historian, editor and translator. He is interested in Czech and world literature, especially in the 20th century, Baroque art and the relationship between literature, visual arts and philosophy. In his texts he combines his knowledge of art theory and history, philosophy, mythology, psychology and clinical psychiatry. After emigrating in 1984, Josef Vojvodík graduated from the Studienkolleg at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (1985-1986) and then studied in Saarbrücken and Munich in 1987-1989. He received his doctorate at the Faculty of Arts of Ludwig-Maximilian Universität (1997) and worked at the Institute of Slavonic Studies there until 2001. Since 2002, he has been associated mainly with the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, where he was habilitated in 2005 and appointed professor in 2009. During his stay in Germany he worked with the radio station Svobodná Evropa (1988-1993) and the cultural editorial office Deutschlandfunk/Deutsche Welle (1990-1999). His first Czech monograph was devoted to the figure of the poet Otokar Březina (From Aestheticism to Eschaton, 2004; CZE). In his text Imagines corporis (2006; CZE) he studied the representation of the body in Czech modernism and the avant-garde. He received the Magnesia Litera Prize for his book Surface, Hiddenness, Ambivalence (2008; CZE) on Mannerism, Baroque and Avant-Garde. In 2020, the magazine A2 included this book in the Czech literary canon after 1989, i.e. in the selection of the most important Czech books in the thirty years since the Velvet Revolution. As an editor, he has contributed to Heslář české avantgardy (2011) and the anthology Osoba a existencia (2009). He is interested in Czech surrealism, especially the work of Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský and art from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
|
|
Jan Wiendl. Literary historian and editor. Born in Klatovy. In 1993, he graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, majoring in Czech language and literature – history, Ph.D. 1999. He was first employed at the Institute for Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, and since 1997 he has been lecturing on the history of Czech literature at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University (associate professor since 2009). In the years 1997–2001, he worked as the editor of the magazine Česká literatura (Czech Literature), in 2004 he co-founded the journal for interdisciplinary bohemian studies Slovo a smysl (Word and Sense) at the FF UK. In the years 2009–2021, in the position of director of the Institute of Czech Literature and Comparative Studies of the Faculty of Economics of the UK. He mainly deals with the issues of modern Czech literature and art of the 20th century. Among his monographic works, he published, for example, the books Vizionáři a vyznavači. K otázce sepětí řádu umění a života v české poezii první poloviny dvacátého století (Visionaries and Confessors. On the question of the connection between the order of art and life in czech poetry of the first half of the twentieth century) (2007; CZE), Hledači krásy a řádu. Studie a skici k české literatuře 20. století (Seekers of Beauty and Order. Studies and essays of czech literature of the 20th century) (2014; CZE) or Jan Zahradníček. Poezie a skutečnost existence (Jan Zahradníček. Poetry and the Reality of Existence, with J. Vojvodík) (2018; CZE). With collective projects, he participated as an author and editor, for example, in the publication A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde. Conceptions of Aesthetics and the Changing Faces of Art 1908‒1958 (2011; ENG), or on the edition series The History of New Modernity: Dějiny nové moderny. Česká literatura v letech 1905-1923 (The History of New Modernity Czech literature in the years 1905–1923) (2010; CZE), Dějiny nové moderny . Lomy vertikál. Česká literatura v letech 1924-1934 (The History of New Modernity. Vertical fractures. Czech literature in the years 1924‒1934) (2014; CZE), Dějiny “nové moderny”. Věk horizontál. Česká liteartura v letech 1935-1947 (The History of “New” modernity. The Age of Horizontals. Czech literature in the years 1935-1947) (2017; CZE), Chór a disonance. Česká liteartura v letech 1947-1963 (Chorus and dissonance. Czech literature in the years 1947-1963) (2022; CZE). He participated in the conception and also edited the four-volume edition series Kultura a totalita I.-IV.) (Culture and Totality I.–IV.) (2013–2016). Among the original editions, he published, for example, the volumes Jan Zahradníček: Verše. Leopoldovský sešit poezie (Jan Zahradníček: Verses. Notebook of poetry from Leopoldov) (2017) or Karel Teige: Deníky 1912-1925 (Diaries 1912‒1925) (2022). Complete CV and bibliography https://uclk.ff.cuni.cz/ustav/lide/zamestnanci/jan-wiendl/. |
 |
