The course traces essential events and periods of Czech history and culture. However, its goal and method are not descriptive. The emphasis is laid upon issues that underlie today’s way of thinking of Czech people, their views and stances. One of the central issues dealt with in the course is the issue of personal/individual identity. While the 19th century prefers the idea of an individual fitting in and belonging to a national (religious, local, professional) collective, the modernity turmoil challenges this idea and unveils a personal/individual identity crisis. An attempt to substitute the national collectivity with a notion of a functional civic society in 1920s and 1930s is followed by an ideological/political collective constructs of 1950s and 1960s . These phenomena reflect and are tackled in the course through an interplay of polarities of heterogeneous vs. homogeneous, private vs. public, past vs. present vs. future, local vs. universal, narrow (i.e. Czech) vs. large (European) context.

The course provides students with a deeper insight into the Czech mentality and character by dealing with issues, which have determined modern Czech identity, as well as with current political and cultural events and issues. Moreover, students get familiarized with the city of Prague. Through both these aspects, the course will help students to integrate into and experience the Czech society from within. The course is co-taught by four faculty members, nevertheless it represents a coherent one: contributions of individual faculty members complement each other and represent a plurality of interpretative angles.

The course consists of in-class lectures, multimedia presentations, documentaries and motion pictures screening, belle letter reading, discussions, and series of five fieldtrips in Prague as well as fieldtrips to Kutná Hora and Terezín. Course requirement: active class participation, reading, essay and a test. The course is obligatory for each program participant and establishes the core of the first two weeks core course session.

Petr Bílek

Full professor of Modern Czech Literature at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University. He belongs among the prominent Czech literary theorists and historians. He has published books on contemporary theories of interpretating narratives, on James Bond and his Communist Czech TV equivalent, on pop culture of the Communist era and on contemporary poetry, along with a number of articles in Czech, English, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Croatian, Hungarian, and Slovak. In 1994-1995, he was a Visiting Professor at Brown University. In 1995 he received a Mellon Post Doctoral Scholarship to continue his research there for two more years. He returned to Brown University as a Visiting Professor in Spring 2000. He has lectured in Hamburg, Uppsala, Stockholm, Budapest, Dublin, London, Glasgow, Lyon, Munich, Amsterdam, Aarhus, and at University of Texas, University of North Carolina, Florida International University, Columbia University, and Yale University. His most recent book Models of Representations in Czech Literary History (co-written by Vladimír Papoušek) has been published by Eastern European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, in 2010.

Václav Cílek

Dr. Cílek coordinates numerous EU and UNESCO environmental and geological projects. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Papers of the Czech Speleological Union (25 volumes) and member of editorial boards of major Czech scientific magazines. He has participated in field research expeditions to Asia and Africa (Tanzania, Vietnam, and Nepal) and is one of the top experts in Pragensia studies. The history of Prague, its mythology and archeology is one of the core foci of his research and publishing activities.

Ivana Doležalová

film lecturer and journalist has worked as a Fulbright Scholar with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the North­western University in 1994-96, and returned there as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 1996 and 1999. An integral part of her teaching activities in the US were courses on Czech fea­ture film and documentary. Specifically, she has taught courses on "Czech Feature Films of the Past Few Decades", "Czech Documentary Film at a Crossroad", and "Central Euro­pean Film and Literature". While in the US, she lectured at various universities, Harvard and Stanford Universities, Northwestern University, and the University of Washington among them. In the course of the past decades she has also worked with various media, National Public Radio, The New York Times, ABC, PBS,BBC and has published articles and interviews in Respekt weekly and Presence quarterly.

Pavel Sládek

Dr. Sládek belongs to very promising and gifted specialists in Hebrew and Jewish Studies of the youngest generation in the Czech Republic. His main interest focuses on the traditional rabbinical literature starting with the Talmud and comments to it. His Ph.D. thesis was devoted to this topic. He lectures Jewish subjects such as traditional Hebrew literature and culture, history of Hebrew lettering, life and work of prominent Jewish personalities, both to Czech and foreign students at Charles University. He has been proving his high professional and teaching abilities also as an invited special lecturer of guided tours around Jewish sites in the Czech Republic.