Ing. Pavel Janáček, Ph.D.

Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS

Pavel Janáček gained his master’s degree in 1991 at the Prague University of Economics and Business, majoring in automated information systems.
It was whilst studying software engineering that he began to engage with literary criticism, serving first as a writer and then an editor of the cultural section of the Lidové Noviny newspaper from 1990 to 1995. He received a PhD in Czech literature from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, in 2000. 

Since 1995, he has worked at the CAS Institute of Czech Literature, where he served as the chairman of the Institute Board between 2007 and 2010 and then as the Institute’s Director for ten years until 2020. Between 2003 and 2009, he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He continues to supervise doctoral students at the jointly accredited programme provided by the University of South Bohemia and the Institute. Through various organisational roles, he has been involved in multiple literary, cultural and research activities in the Czech Republic: he was a panel member at the Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and he headed the organizational committee of the 3rd World Congress of Czech Literature Studies in Prague in 2005. At present, among other roles, he is a member of the Guarantee Board of the Czech National Library. 

In his research, he focuses on the sociology of literature, book history, and cultural studies. In 2003, he founded the Institute’s department for research into literary culture, which specialises in the socio-cultural and economical contexts of literary communication in the Czech lands since the mid-18th century to the present. He is one of the main authors of the two-volume history of Czech literary and print censorship, and the author of various publications on the 20th century popular literature. As a member of the editorial board, he co-edits Czech Literature, a central journal in the field of literary bohemistics.

Phone: +420 221 403 282

E-mail: janacek@kav.cas.cz