Prof. Tomáš Kubíček

Tomas Kubicekis the director of the Moravian Library and an internationally respected scholar specialising in semiotics, the history of Czech literature, and comparative studies. He has a longstanding engagement with the works of Milan Kundera, teaches at Charles University in Prague, and has authored numerous academic and scholarly monographs.

Tomáš Kubíček graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at Masaryk University in Brno, earning his doctorate in 1999. He became an associate professor at Charles University in Prague in 2008 and was appointed professor at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice in 2013. He has worked as a researcher at the Moravian Museum and the Academy of Sciences, and has taught at the University of South Bohemia and the University of Applied Sciences. He currently teaches at Charles University and is frequently invited to give lectures at universities and institutions abroad, including in Toronto, Paris, Rome, Warsaw, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei.

In 2014, he became the director of the Moravian Library in Brno, a position he still holds. He is also a member of the Central Library Council and actively participates in other library bodies and associations. He is a member of the European Narratology Network, Le centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the Prague Linguistic Circle.

He has published monographs on narratology and 20th century Czech literature, including Narratological Chapters on the Novels of Milan Kundera (2001), The Storyteller: Categories of Narrative Analysis (2007), Intersubjectivity in Literary Narrative (2007), Felix Vodička: Opinion and Method—Towards a History of Czech Structuralism (2010), Central European Milan Kundera (2013), Narratology: Structural Analysis of Narrative (2014), and The Order of Shape (2020).

In collaboration with Petr A. Bílek and John Pierre, he prepared an annotated collection of Jan Mukařovský’s works for the French edition, Écrits 1928-1946 (Paris, 2018). He has initiated numerous international literary conferences and edited collective monographs, including Faith and Expression: Proceedings of the Conference “…used to be open with me…” (with J. Wiendl, 2005), On Art and Life: F. X. Šalda 1867-1937-2007 (with L. Merhaut and J. Wiendl, 2007), Moderna/Moderny (with J. Wiendl, 2013), Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress (with A. Lass, 2014), and Images of Culture and Society in the Period of the First Czechoslovak Republic (with J. Wiendl, 2018). In 2019, on the occasion of Milan Kundera’s 90th birthday, he collaborated with Kundera and Věra Kundera to prepare the exhibition Milan Kundera (Not Lost) in Translations, for which a catalogue of the same title and the edited volume of Milan Kundera in Translations were published.