Sat9 Apr02:00pm(10 mins)
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Where:
CWB Syndicate Room 2
Track:
Presenter:
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The Velvet Revolution did not bring the work of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation to an end, although the British Trustees insisted that responsibility for its activities should be gradually taken over by their Czech and Slovak colleagues. The aim was to extend the teaching it had provided for the underground seminars to students at the established universities. Programmes of cooperation were set up with university colleagues who showed themselves both academically competent and spiritually tuned to the new subjects appropriate for a Western democracy. These projects were mainly in the Foundation’s traditional fields of philosophy, social science, political science and theology, although the teaching of law became a major focus. This paper will document the main activities in which the Foundation was involved in Czech and Slovak higher education in the early 1990s, and the university teachers with whom it worked. The paper will draw on correspondence, reports and minutes held in the JHEF archive in the Moravian Museum, Brno, and on interviews with British and Czech academic colleagues.