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Czech and Slovak: two most logical, complex and challenging languages

Alexander Dubček: the moving wheel of Czechoslovakia's history in the 1960s

Franz Kafka: master of imagination & predecessor of Prague literature

Milan Kundera: his inquiry into human nature; great thoughtful novelist

Bohumil Hrabal: his sense of purely Czech humor and surrealistic images

Arnošt Lustig: his own touching story of survival, his characters' courage

Václav Havel: his complex personal history and sense of responsibility  

Jaroslav Hašek: his heirloom (humor) passed onto native Czechs

Ján Kadár: creator of moving film on the darkest period in Slovak history

Miloš Forman: his honesty about man's struggle (individual vs. society)

Věra Chytilová: her daring honesty and truth in filmmaking    

Steven Pinker: how brilliantly his own mind works

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: his strength and ideas on happiness in labor camps

Robert Bolt: his elegant perfection of Doctor Zhivago screenplay

Peter Shaffer: his Amadeus, a musical genius

Alan Ball: his subtle beauty in American Beauty

and many other thinkers, producers, writers, philosophers

Books published in 2021, and under   Contract

Czech: An Essential Grammar. Karen von Kunes: Co-author of  the new updated edition of the late Professor, Oxford scholar James Naughton’s book. Routledge, Publication date: December 30, 2020/January 2021.

Karen von Kunes: Introduction to Martin Vopěnka’s novel, Ballad of Descent. Northwestern University Press, 1995.

                           Karen von Kunes's textbooks used in class

Dr. Karen von Kunes has published additional works (scholarly papers, numerous articles and book reviews, etc.), organized a number of panels on literature and film and delivered papers at conferences and has contributed to various aspects of development of Czech studies (literature, film, culture, creative writing) at Yale, Harvard and other universities with her teaching and service. She received many academic awards, and has been recognized as one of The Best 300 Professors in The Princeton Review published by Random House in 2012. Her CV, which provides full detail, can be requested as a separate document at karen.vonkunes@yale.edu.   

Karen von Kunes has taught (at)

• Yale University (current)

• In Kafka's Spirit Program: Yale Summer Session in Prague

• Yale-NUS Singapore: Milan Kundera, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Goh Poh Seng, Wang Xiaobo (2015)

• Harvard University: Harvard College (10 years)

• Harvard Extension (12 years)

• Tufts University (1 year)

• University of Texas at Austin (1 year)

• Boston College (1 year)

• Boston University (1 semester)

• McGill University (1 semester)

        Education

• MBA Graduate School of Business Administration, U of Texas-Austin   

  • Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, McGill University

• B.A. summa cum laude, First Class Honor in Russian/Slavic Studies, McGill University

• B.Sc. two-year program at the Université de Montréal (French speaking university)

• Visiting Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, and at Georgetown University

• Doctoral and/or post-doctoral research at the Library of Congress, Université de Montréal, Moscow University and Charles University

Karen von Kunes: Author of adaptation and English translation of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich’s play, “Svět  za mřížemi.” In Laurence Senelick's Cabaret Performance, Vol. 2.  New York: PAJ Books, 1992. 

Lexicography and Cultural Studies:

Language

Karen von Kunes: Czech Practical Dictionary Czech-English/English-Czech. Includes Concise Grammar of the Language and more than 42,000 entries, each providing gender and morphological data. Hippocrene Books, 2011.

Karen von Kunes: 72 Discussions of the Czech Language to Make You Think, Learn and Entertain, in the series Everything You Wanted  to Know about Czech. Práh Publishers, 1995.

Creative Writing: Novel

Among the Sinner (Práh International Edition, 2013). This award-winning novel has been acclaimed for its inquiry into immigration. Its framework alludes to Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron; like a group of ten young people who flee from plague-ridden Florence to an abandoned mansion in the Middle Ages, ten young “sinners”from various countries take shelter in a former mansion Decameron, hoping to escape the 21st century persecution of immigrants of illegal status. Each “sinner’s" story uncovers an emotional journey, focusing on the internal world of two protagonists and their search for a home-security feeling, a concept for which Czech has its own word, zázemí. The novel shows the impact of global displacement on individuals.

Barron's Travel Wise Czech. Karen von Kunes: Editor-in-Chief and co-author of the translated English edition. Barron’s Educational Series, 1998.Karen von Kunes: Fast & Easy Czech. The 60-minute Survival Program. Crown Publishers, Inc.,1992.

TV Interviews:

Had several interviews for Czech TV stations, and a number of additional interviews for American and European magazines and newspapers. For seven years worked as a free-lance contributor to The Prague Post.

"What good is it, my brothers, is a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?" (James 2:14).