Avril 2024

In 2007 I started working at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences as a member of the Department for Research into 20th-century and Contemporary Literature. I collaborated in developing a four-volume History of Czech Literature 1945–1989. In 2010 I became a member of the Literary Lexicography Department, where I created dictionary entries for the Dictionary of Czech Literature http://slovnikceskeliteratury.cz/. I was a visiting scholar at Humboldt Univerzität zu Berlin, University of Glasgow and SUNY at New Paltz. In 2013 I received a Czech Academy of Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship. I became Head of Czech at Oxford University in 2014. Since 2018 I have been working at the Institute of Czech Literature as Editor in Chief of the Czech Literary Studies. I was a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2018–2019).

My research interests centre on the Czech Avant-garde and Modernism in a wider European context. In my monograph In the Midst of the Crowd (2016), I examined the reception of French Unanimism in Czech literature, the relationship between the post-war Russian and Czech Avant-garde etc. I was interested in the opposing themes which appear in this era, such as expressionism versus avant-garde and individualism versus collectivism. I continue to be interested in experimental works of art and am currently focusing on the work of Milada Součková and how it relates to Anglo-American modernism. Alongside the editors of the works of Milada Součková I am preparing Součková’s correspondence (with Roman Jakobson, Jindřich Chalupecký et al.) for publication (2018). I am also currently working on my second monograph, which deals with Czech Modernism in the 1930s (Czech late modernism in a broader transnational perspective) and the context of Anglo-American modernism. My monograph Major Works, Minor Authors. A Transnational Optic of Czech Modernism will be published in 2019. I write fiction. My collection of poetry I Let You into My House was published in 2016. My novel Evička in 2018.

I taught Czech at the Prague Language Institute in 2002–2007. In 2008 I was employed at the Charles University Faculty of Education and subsequently at the Faculty of Humanities (2011–2014) to teach the following courses: “An Introduction to Text Analysis”: the interpretation of the text and the history of changing approaches to texts. In Oxford, I was teaching courses: Modern Czech Literature in the Broader European Context; Czech Literature in Exile; Special Authors of the Twentieth Century: Hrabal, Kundera and Havel as the Constructors of Modern Czech History; Czech and English Modernism; Czech Modern Literature in English Translations.

Lecture "From Laughter to Forgetting: the Thresholds of Czech Interwar Avant-Garde"