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.