Stephanie Jug
(Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia)

30 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 11:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
Passcode: 952969

The lecture is organized as part of the APVV Memory, Space and Identity in German-Speaking /Transcultural/ Literature from Modernity to the Present.

Children’s autonomy, defiance and lack of discipline seem like contemporary problems that often afflict not only worried parents but also their immediate environment. However, writers at the end of the 19th century show examples of defiant, independent and, above all, curious children, with a touch of humor and criticism. Moreover, using the example of their little literary heroes, they also somewhat give didactic lessons about how thin the line between discipline and violence can become, and under what conditions a child can develop into a mature person. Continue reading Guest lecture – (Un)Usual Education Methods and Child Rebellion in German Literature from Slavonia →

Sonja Novak
(Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Croatia)

30 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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Meeting ID: 845 5321 3152
Passcode: 952969

The lecture is organized as part of the APVV Memory, Space and Identity in German-Speaking /Transcultural/ Literature from Modernity to the Present.

Alexander Roda Roda, a Czech-born German-speaking author from Slavonia from the turn of the 19th into 20th century, often employs in his writing the practice of turning his real biographical experiences into highly stylized, satirical, and anecdotal fiction covering the broader multicultural context of the Austro-Hungariian Monarchy. By treating his life as raw material for entertainment, Roda Roda intentionally blurred the lines between individual memory (“personal story”) and the collective reality of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (“history”). Continue reading Guest lecture – Roda Roda’s Strategies of Literarization of (Personal) History →

Chance, Passion and Necessity: Translating from Czech and Slovak into French since the 19th Century – Some Reflections

Prof. Antoine Marès
(Emeritus Professor, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

16 September 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in French with online simultaneous translation into Slovak via Zoom

Lecture Description in French

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Meeting ID: 860 0956 9768
Passcode: 649525

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA project Translation and translating in the history and present of the Slovak cultural space. Transformations of forms, status and functions: texts, personalities, institutions.

Why and how did a historian of international relations come to study translation? The answer to this question must be sought within the broader context of interstate relations in the twentieth century, with a focus on the trajectories of those involved in translation. The lecture aims to propose a typology of translators and to examine their motivations and professional backgrounds: how did Czech, Slovak, or French speakers come to translate from Czech or Slovak into French? What kind of language training did they receive? What ideological frameworks shaped their translations? Particular attention will be devoted to translations into Slovak, approached primarily from a historian’s perspective, with emphasis on the historical context in which these translations were produced and received rather than on their literary dimension.

Antoine Marès is an Emeritus Professor of Central European History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is the author or editor of some fifty volumes, including Histoire des Tchèques et des Slovaques (History of the Czechs and Slovaks, Tempus, 2005, to be republished in 2026); Edvard Beneš de la gloire à l’abîme. Un drame entre Hitler et Staline (Edvard Beneš: From Glory to the Abyss. A Drama Between Hitler and Stalin, Perrin, 2015); L’onde de choc tchécoslovaque. 1968 en Europe médiane et occidentale (The Czechoslovak Shockwave: 1968 in Central and Western Europe; co-edited with Françoise Mayer and Jacques Rupnik, Institut d’études slaves, 2020). He is currently preparing a history of Czech-to-French translators Le hasard, la passion et la nécessité: traduire du tchèque en français. Une histoire de trajectoires depuis le début du XXe siècle (Chance, Passion and Necessity: Translating from Czech into French. A History of Trajectories since the Beginning of the 20th Century) and a two-volume book Histoire des relations franco-tchécoslovaques (1918 – 1992) (History of Franco-Czechoslovak Relations /1918-1992/).

Anatolij V. Kharkhurin
(independent scholar)

24 June 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English and Russian

The lecture is organized within the framework of the IMPULZ grant Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature.

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Meeting ID: 869 0256 5703
Passcode: 756110

This lecture examines literary creativity through the lens of plurilingual and pluricultural experience. Traditional approaches have treated creativity as a cognitive capacity located within the individual mind. This perspective offers limited explanatory power for multilingual literary practice, where meaning emerges across languages and cultural frames. Building on the Plurilingual Creativity Framework, the lecture conceptualizes creativity as a dynamic process shaped by the interaction of cognitive, affective, and reflective pathways. Language contact in literature is approached as a manifestation of this process. Multilingual writing, code-switching, and translation are interpreted as creative strategies that enable expanded meaning-making and identity construction. The talk also addresses methodological challenges in studying creativity in multilingual contexts and outlines implications for literary analysis. By reframing language contact as a creative resource, the lecture offers a theoretically grounded perspective on how plurilingual experience shapes literary expression.

Anatoliy V. Kharkhurin holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the City University of New York, as well as degrees in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on the relationship between multilingualism and creativity, with particular emphasis on plurilingual and pluricultural competence as drivers of creative development. He is the author of the book Multilingualism and Creativity and has published extensively in leading journals on creativity and multilingualism. He is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new monograph on the Plurilingual Creativity Framework, which advances an integrative model of creativity across cognitive, affective, and reflective domains. He developed the Plurilingual Intercultural Creative Keys (PICK) program, an educational framework designed to foster creative, linguistic, and intercultural competences. In addition to his academic work, he is active as a poet, multimedia artist, and curator.

Mary Orsak
(University of Oxford)

20 May 2026 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS

The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA project Slovak Literature in Inter-Literary and Transcultural Contexts.

This seminar will explore the American poet, essayist, and feminist Adrienne Rich’s seminal work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution (1976), which distinguishes between “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction—and to children; and the institution—which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control” (13). The seminar will examine how effectively Rich’s interrogations of motherhood function in other contexts, particularly in Czech, Slovak, and Russian literature of the 1990s.

Mary Orsak is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on contemporary Czech, Slovak, and Russian literature. She has written two chapters on Milan Kundera in Milan Kundera: Known and Unknown (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Modern Czech Literature: Writing in Times of Political Trauma (Vernon Press, 2025).

You can read M. Orsak’s study published in World Literature Studies 4/2025 HERE.