The Department of English and American Studies is one of the original departments of the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University and the second oldest English department in the Czech Republic. The Department currently has more than 600 students studying in Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degree programmes. All teaching in the Department is conducted in English.

Those interested in studying at the Department may choose from the following degree programmes:

• Bachelor’s Degree (Bc., full and part-time programmes)
  • English Language and Literature
• Master’s Degree (Mgr., full and part-time programmes)
  • English Language and Literature
  • Secondary School Teaching – English Language and Literature
  • English-language Translation
  • North-American Culture Studies
• Doctoral Degree (PhD., full and part-time programmes)
  • English Linguistics
  • Literatures in English
    

Studying abroad. Students studying in the Department of English and American Studies can take advantage of Erasmus student exchange agreements with 24 partner departments in 13 countries, including the Universities of Leeds, Bristol, Oslo, Lund, Cologne, and Athens. In addition, Masaryk University offers its students dozens of other exchanges at various universities around the world.

Teaching. Teaching in the Department takes place in classrooms and lecture halls equipped with up-to-date technology. This includes a language laboratory that can be used both for teaching language and simultaneous interpretation. Students can take advantage of the Department’s Self-Access Centre, which has a large collection of dictionaries and reference materials as well as an extensive collection of videotapes. This facility supplements the Faculty of Arts’ Central Library, which offers students more than 30,000 volumes of British and American literature as well as the largest collection of Canadian literature in Central Europe.

Research. The Department of English and American Studies is rightly proud of its long scholarly tradition. The most prominent scholar to have worked in the Department is Prof. Jan Firbas, who made significant contributions to the study of language through his development of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective. In addition to continuing the tradition of research established by Prof. Firbas, the Department has focused on areas of research in linguistic, literary and cultural studies.
At present, these other areas of research in linguistics include language in the media, legal English, and the historical development of the English language. Research in British literature is focused on three main areas: Elizabethan drama and culture, the literature of Victorian decadence and contemporary British literature. The Department is also active in North American Studies, where research ranges from Canadian and American cinema to ecological literature and from contemporary First Nations/American Indian literature to questions of cultural identity in Canada and the United States. Research activities in the field of translation deal with translation corpora, the translation of children’s literature and translation stylistics.

Conferences. The Department organized the first large conference of Czechoslovak scholars in English and American Studies back in 1986. This has started a tradition that now has the form of a large international conference, taking place avery fifth year.

In 2018, The Department hosted to the international conference of European Society for the Study of English – ESSE 2018. The ESSE Conference, with almost 700 participants, took place in the Czech Republic for the first time, and was jointly organized by the Department and CZASE (Czech Association for the Study of English).

Extraculicular activities, theatre. Extracurricular activities are an important part of student life at university. Students in the Department have established three student organizations – ESCAPE (the English Students’ Club), the Book Club and the Bohemian-Moravian William Shakespeare Society – which organize both social and scholarly events. The Department is also proud of its student theatre group, The Gypsywood Players, which has performing for audiences both at home and abroad during for over fifty years.

Graduates. In addition to working as teachers and translators, our graduates have proven themselves successful in fields as diverse as diplomacy, the media, business and government. Our best students often choose an academic career.