JOSEF JAŘAB - Palacky University, Olomouc, and former Chairman of the Media Committee of the Council of Europe

Josef  Jařab is professor of English and American Literature and director of  the Center for Comparative Cultural Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc. He has written or edited a score of books and hundreds of essays on cultural pluralism,  African American literature and culture, modern poetry and fiction, and issues of higher education. He has lectured  all over Europe, and in the United States and Canada. He is a founding member of the Czech Learned Society, and the first chairman of the Czech Fulbright Committee and the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies;  he served as  president of the European Association for American Studies from 2000 to 2004. After the "velvet revolution" in 1989 he became the first freely elected university administrator in Czechoslovakia and served as  rector of Palacký University for seven years; in 1996 his university was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for the reforms carried out during the period of transformation. From 1977 to 1999 he was  rector and president of Central European University in Budapest and Warsaw. As an independent, he held a seat in the Senate of the Czech Parliament where he chaired the Committeee on International Affairs, Defense and Security. In the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe he was vice-chairman of the Committee on Culture and Education and chaired the Subcommittee on Media. For a decade he has represented Czech humanities in the European Science Foundation and is a member of the Observatory of the Bologna Magna Charta Universitatum. He received honorary doctorates from Durham University, England, Moravian College, Bethlehem, and Mount Mercy College, Cedar Rapids, USA, and is the first Czech recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Freedom Award. He had scholarships from the American Council of Learned Societies, from Harvard University´s DuBois Institute for African-American Research, the British Council, the Salzburg Seminar of American Studies.He is a member of the Czech Writers´ Community and of PEN-club.

First panel audio recording - T.Klvana, T. Patterson, A. Stanger, R. Yeoh, F. Kazemi, J. Jarab