Centre for British and Commonwealth Studies

Director:
PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc., M.A.

Members:
Louis Armand, PhD, Colin Clark, M.A., Klára Kolinská, PhD, Helena Znojemská, PhD

External Member:
PhDr. Ludmila Volná, PhD

About the Centre

The Centre organizes compulsory BA courses (Introduction to British Studies, British history) and a limited number of elective BA seminars. It is responsible for the British and Commonwealth special programme. The principal teaching and research areas include British cultural studies (Nováková, Znojemská), Canadian studies (Kolinská), Australian art, film and society (Armand), African and South Asian diaspora literature in Britain (Nováková), travel writing and gender studies (Nováková), Anglophone Indian literature (Volná), and Scottish history and literature (Clark).

The Centre cooperates with international and Czech institutions. Visiting speakers have included Prof. Roger Bromley, Prof. Patrick Williams, Dr. Hanna Scolnicov and Professor Harish Trivedi. 

In 2000 the Centre organised the Prague-Nottingham Trent Symposium in Cultural Studies.

With the support of the British Council in Prague and of the Charles University Grant Agency (GA UK) the Centre has assembled a library of primary and secondary sources on contemporary British cultural studies, postcolonial studies, British history and film. The collection is now available in the English & American Studies Library (room 107).

 

Current PhD Students:

Mgr. Jana Marešová: Storytelling and Myth in Contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Novel

Former PhD Students:

Mgr. Olga Roebuck, PhD (2007): Subverting Scotland: Cultural Identities in Contemporary Scottish Fiction

Mgr. Markéta Olehlová, PhD (2012): Identity and Displacement in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction

Mgr. Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová: Chicana Literature: A Feminist Perspective of  Gloria Anzaldua´s Identity Politics (2017)