Roman Bělor

Roman Bělor

Talk Title: Prague Spring Music Festival—Per aspera ad astra

Roman Bělor was born into a musical family in Prague in 1958, but studied and graduated in Economy and Management at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Following his graduation in 1982, Bělor worked in the techno-economic sector. In 1990, he became the Orchestra Manager of the Prague Symphony Orchestra and was Director of that institution from 1992 to 2001. He has been the Director of the Prague Spring Festival since 2001, and has been Vice Chairman of the Czech Association of Music Festivals since 2002. The French Minister of Culture awarded Bělor the Chevalier and Officier de l‘Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and 2001, respectively. As a member of various teams and panels, he was instrumental in developing recent recognition of Prague as a European cultural center. Bělor is also a member of the Council of the UNESCO International Fund for Promotion of Culture, a member of the Club for Old Prague (Klub Za starou Prahu), and an associate member of the Prague Mánes Fine Arts Society.


Martin Bouda

Talk Title: Prague Spring on Television—Seeds and Aftermath

Martin Bouda has been working with Czech television in one form or other since his 2006 graduation from Information and Librarian Science at the Charles University in Prague. He has worked at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts Library in his hometown of Brno and, through the EUscreen project in 2010-2016, coordinated promotion of Czech Television by using almost 1,300 curated videos to explore Czech’s rich and diverse cultural history via television content. 2008 signalled the beginning of his work in the Czech Television Archives, and he has supervised the Audiovisual Archives and been involved in their digitization, reconstruction, and online archival publication projects since 2017. Bouda is active on the international field, with presentations promoting Czech TV history and its archives on international archival and media events, including an EUscreen conference in Stockholm, an “Unlocking Broadcast Archives from Eastern Europe” seminar in Bucharest, and a “1968 in the Media” seminar in Paris.

Martin Bouda

Mariana Čapková

Mariana Čapková

Mariana Čapková, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln alumna 2007 - 2008, had the unique opportunity to study International Relations as a Robitschek Programme scholar. She graduated from a five-year Master of Arts International Relations programme - Diplomacy and International Politics - at the Prague University of Economics and studied in Germany and in Russia. After graduation, she worked at the International Relations Department of the National Security Authority of the Czech Republic, later worked for the National Cyber Security Centre and became a Member of the Management Board in ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency). For the last four years she has been working at the Ministry of Agriculture. She is the head of the Board of Trustees at National Stud at Kladruby nad Labem, UNESCO aspirant. She is involved in many transatlantic cultural activities and cultural exchange programmes.


David Černý

Talk Title: A Conversation with James D. Le Sueur and Patricia A. Simpson

One of Europe’s most important and provocative artists, David Černý is best known for his social commentary-oriented sculptures. Born in Prague in 1967, Černý’s entrance on the world’s radar was in 1991 with the bright pink repainting of a Soviet tank, which had been serving as a war memorial in formerly Soviet-occupied Prague. His evocatively-titled artwork is primarily located in the Czech Republic, but pieces have been featured worldwide and permanent installations are also housed in Germany, Belgium, Charlotte, NC, Poland, and Switzerland. Other mediums Černý has explored include acting, animation, architecture, documentary, music video, narration, stage design, and work on the TV program ARTÓZA, an examination of “contemporary art, screenplay, and theme.”

David Černý

Bruce Garver

Bruce Garver

Talk Title: A Czech-Speaking American Historian Views the Prague Spring in Historical Perspective

Bruce Garver earned a Ph.D. in History in 1971 from Yale where he taught full-time until coming to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 1976 to teach courses on “the Renaissance in Italy,” “the Age of Enlightenment,” “the Risorgimento,” “transport history,” and “the two World Wars.” In eight semesters from 1982 to 1990, he also taught Czech immigrant history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was an exchange student in Prague for ten months in 1967 and returned to do research in 1971, in 1973, and eight times since 1989. During the fall of 1990, he taught American history in Czech at Charles University and in the fall of 1995 taught Czech history at Palacký University in Olomouc. He is the author of a book, The Young Czech Party, 1874-1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System (Yale University Press, 1978), and many articles, book chapters, and reviews about modern Czechoslovak and Austro-Hungarian history and Czech immigration history. Currently, he is doing research on Czech-Italian relations from 1848 to 1918. Garver served as Chairperson of the UNO Department of History during sixteen of the years before August 2008. He is a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies and a member of eight professional associations. As an officer in the U.S. Navy for four years, Garver served on the USS GALLANT (MSO-489), one of five ships that helped the South Vietnamese Navy establish a “barrier patrol” from December 1961 through March 1962 along the 17th parallel between Da Nang and the Paracel Islands. On the USS NAVARRO (APA-215), he participated during May 1963 in phase “Autumn Gold” of Project SHAD in which the NAVARRO was one of five ships upon which A-4 aircraft released bio-toxin Bacillus globigii, a relative of anthrax. Undertaken by the Kennedy Administration and involving some 17,000 U.S. servicemen, Project SHAD – declassified in 2002 – carried out the most extensive testing of chemicals and bacteria upon unwitting citizens ever achieved in American history. Garver’s next book, Nebraska Czechs: History and Heritage, is currently in editing with the publisher, publication date to be determined.


Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz

Talk Title: What Would Kafka Have Said?

Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz is professor emerita at the University of British Columbia. Growing up in a small Czech town in Moravia, Marketa’s family was kicked out of their apartment, and as a teenager, Marketa was kicked out of school. This trauma stemmed from her parent’s mixed marriage, her Jewish father spending time in the Terezin concentration Camp in 1944-1945. After the war Marketa attended school in Prague for several years but in 1948 the small family decided to emigrate to Canada leaving with little money but much excitement in the wake of Soviet occupation. In 1955 and 1957, she earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Inspired by the work of Czech playwrights of the 1960s, Marketa and her mother began returning to Czechoslovakia on a regular basis through the late 1970s and the 1980s. In 1978 she traveled to meet Václav Havel at his home in Hrádeček and thus established a longtime friendship with the future president.

In Canada, Marketa used her education and her youthful experiences to establish herself in the role of professor. Her focus on German, Polish, and Czech literature, samizdat literature, and the contributions of Czech playwrights such as Václav Havel, Pavel Kohout, Josef Topol, and Ivan Klima proved fruitful. The author of multiple works, Marketa is an award-winning teacher and author. In 1972, and again in 1992, she received the UBC Excellence in Teaching award, and in 1988, she was awarded the order of the Ordo Scriptores Bohemici in Prauge. In 1992 she was awarded the Boeschenstein medal of the CAUTG (Canadian Association of University Teachers of German), and most recently in 2016, she was recognized with the Jiří Theiner Award for her work in promoting Czech literature. Her many publications include The Silenced Theatre: Czech Playwrights Without a Stage, 1979, and several edited works: The Filter of Translation in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 1980; DramaContemporary: Czechoslovakia, 1985; The Vanek Plays: Four Authors One Character, 1987; Good-Bye, Samizdat: Twenty Years of Czechoslovak Underground Writing, 1992, and; Critical Essays on Václav Havel, 1999.

Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz

Petra Hůlová

Petra Hůlová

Talk Title: 1968 in 2018

Petra Hůlová is a prize-winning Czech novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. She studied Language, Culture and Anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator, and New York and was a Fulbright Scholar. Her 8 novels and 3 plays have been translated into more than 10 languages. All This Belongs to Me (Czech: Pamet mojí babicce [A Memoir for My Grandmother], 2002) and Plastic Three-Bedroom Apartment (Czech: Umělohmotný třípokoj, 2006) have been translated into English and have been lauded in both their original Czech and their translations.


Hynek Kmoníček

Before his appointment and since 2013, Ambassador Hynek Kmoníček worked as the Director of the Foreign Affairs Department in the Office of the President of the Czech Republic. His diplomatic career has spanned more than two decades since he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, specifically its Department for Middle East and Africa, in 1995. He worked in different positions such as the Director of North Africa and Middle East Department, the Director General for Asia, Africa, and America, and the Deputy Foreign Minister in two different periods. He served as the Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Australia, India and the United Nations in New York. Before joining the Foreign Service, the Ambassador studied English and Arabic Language Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and Modern History of the Middle East and Hebrew and Arabic Languages Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Ambassador Kmoníček currently also writes for various magazines and newspapers.

Hynek Kmoníček

Eda Kriseová

Eda Kriseová

Talk Title: Frozen Spring

Eda Kriseová is the daughter of an architect and a sculptress. She studied journalism at Charles University, Prague, and became a reporter and editor of Mladý svět and Listy, popular and progressive journals on the eve of the Prague Spring. She has also travelled extensively and has worked as a volunteer on projects for developing countries, and also in kibbutz in Israel. After the Russian invasion of 1968, Kriseová was banned from publishing and was blacklisted; she belonged to Prague’s group of dissidents, intellectuals in opposition. She worked as a volunteer in a mental hospital and started writing short stories, publishing her works in the underground literary revues and samizdat, and in translation in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Czech exile publishing houses. In 1989, during the Velvet Revolution, Kriseová was a member of the coordinating committee of Civic Forum (Občanské forum), and she joined Václav Havel to his presidential office. She led the Department of Pardons and Paroles, but then resigned along with Havel prior to the Velvet Divorce, and returned to writing. Since then, she has been a freelance writer. Eda Kriseová’s texts are found in many prestigious anthologies in English and German; her short stories and novels, including Biography of Václav Havel (1993), have been translated into 7 languages.


Dr. James D. Le Sueur

Dr. James D. Le Sueur is the Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations and the Department Chair for History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Le Sueur joined the Department of History at UNL in 2001 as a specialist in twentieth-century world intellectual and cultural history. He has taught courses on intellectual history, France, Algeria, terrorism, radical Islam, twentieth-century decolonization, and international relations. Currently, he is working on three documentary films, including one on Václav Havel. Dr. Le Sueur is the author of a great many articles and books, including Algeria since 1989: Between Democracy and Terror and Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria. He is also currently working on a new book about global decolonization.

Dr. Le Sueur is the organizer of the Prague Spring 50 symposium at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, working with a great many, scholars, speakers, artists, photographers, journalists, diplomats, and a long list of people both in Nebraska and throughout the world to put together this incredible, historical event.

Dr. James D. Le Sueur

Ehsan Naim

Ehsan Naim

Talk Title: The Limits of Youth Activism in Afghanistan

Originally from Afghanistan, Ehsan Naim is currently based in the Czech Republic with EPDOR, an export company focused on international engineering and technological expertise, especially in the fields of sustainability (namely, in energy) and stability for developing Middle Eastern and African markets. He drew from his experiences traveling with Václav Havel and worked to introduce Havellian ideas into the Afghan political and university systems. In 2016, Naim earned his Master’s in International Development and Agricultural Economics from the Czech University of Life Sciences (CULS).


Alan Pajer

Talk Title: Photographing Václav Havel

Alan Pajer is a photo reporter and photographer who devoted himself to working with personalities and celebrities of the Czech and Slovak music scene. Since 1990, he has worked as a photographer of the Presidential Office and personal photographer of Václav Havel, Václav Havel’s Office, and The Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation Vision 97. After studying at the secondary graphic school, Pajer graduated from the Academy for Performing Arts (FAMU) and worked as a portrait photographer in the FOTOGRAFIA Company, where he was also employed as a photojournalist. Since 1989, he has been a freelance photographer. At present, he is interested mainly in used photography; he is also engaged in portrait photography and captures in his work the changes of Prague. Pajer has been awarded with many prizes at different exhibitions and competitions, such as World Press Photo and Czech Press Photo. He became one of the founding members of the civic association “YES for Europe.”

Alan Pajer

Jacques Rupnik

Jacques Rupnik

Talk Title: The Other 1968—Three Readings of Prague Spring

Jacques Rupnik was born in Prague in 1950, educated at the University of Paris and at Harvard, is currently Director of Research at CERI and Professor at Sciences Po in Paris and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. He holds degrees in History from the University of Paris I-Sorbonne and Politics from the Institut d‘Etudes Politiques de Paris (IEP), a Master’s in Soviet Studies from Harvard University (1974), and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Paris I-Sorbonne (1978). A former research associate at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University (1974-1975), Eastern Europe analyst for the BBC World Service from 1977 to 1982, he has been based in Paris since he joined CERI, Sciences Po at the end of 1982. He has been executive director of the International Commission for the Balkans, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1995-1996) and drafter of its report Unfinished Peace (Carnegie, 1996), member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (1999-2000), co-drafter of The Kosovo Report (Oxford UP, 2000), co-editor of the journal Transeuropéennes (1992-2003), and member of the editorial board of the East European Politics and Society (ACLS) since 2009.

Rupnik has been an advisor to the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel (1990-1992) and continued to work with him after that. He is a member of the board of the Václav Havel presidential library in Prague. Among the various positions held: advisor to the European Commission 2007–2010; member of the scientific council of the Prague Institute of International Relations (since 2007); member of the board of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague since 2010; member of the board of directors of the European Partnership for Democracy in Brussels (2008-2013); member of the Research Council of the International Forum for Democracy Studies in Washington (since 2013). He has been a Visiting Professor in several European universities and in the Department of Government at Harvard University where he was visiting scholar at the Davis Center (2008) and at the Center for European Studies (2011, 2013, 2016).

Rupnik has published a number of books and scholarly articles including The Other Europe (London, 1989, translated in a dozen of languages and a companion volume to a six hour documentary film on postwar Eastern Europe for British television). His publications include Histoire du Parti communiste tchécoslovaque (1981), Le Nouveau Continent (with D. Moisi, 1991), L‘Europe des Vingt-Cinq (with Ch.Lequesne, 2004), and edited volumes such as Totalitarismes (1984), Czech and Slovak Roads to the European Union (2003), International Perspectives on the Balkans (2003), Les Banlieues de l‘Europe, les politiques de voisinage de l‘UE (2007), The Western Balkans and the EU: ‘the hour of Europe’ (Paris, EUISS, 2011), 1989 as a Political World Event: Democracy, Europe and the new international system, with an introduction by Václav Havel (London, Routledge, 2013), and Géopolitique de la democratization, l‘Europe et ses voisinage (Presses de Sciences Po, 2014).


Tomáš Sedláček

Talk Title: The Greatest Transformation—Reflections on 1989, Growth Capitalism, and the Price of Our Values

Tomáš Sedláček is a Czech economist, columnist, media commentator, and a lecturer at Charles University in Prague. During his time as a student at that university in 2001, he met and became an economic advisor to former President Václav Havel at the age of 24. Sedláček is also a former member of the National Economic Council of the Czech Republic. He is currently the Chief Macroeconomic Strategist at ČSOB (Československá obchodní banka, a.s. [a Czech national bank]), a member of EU Initiative “A New Narrative for Europe” as commissioned by José Manuel Durão Barroso, and a Council Member of the World Economic Forum focused on New Economic Thinking. A 2009 bestseller in the Czech Republic, Sedláček’s Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street was translated and published in English by Oxford University Press in June 2011.

Tomáš Sedláček

Viktor Stoilov

Viktor Stoilov

Talk Title: A Conversation with James D. Le Sueur

Viktor Stoilov (born 1961) graduated from the Department of Ethnography and Folklore Studies at Charles University in Prague. From 1988 to 1989, he photographed a series of portraits of banned writers at that time. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he presented these portraits at several exhibitions and published them as Torst Publishing House’s first book. The Torst Publishing House was founded in 1990 and has published over 600 books to this day, such as the writings of Václav Havel, Egon Bondy, Ivan Martin Jirous, the photographic books of Josef Koudelka and Josef Sudek, and many, many others.


Paul Wilson

Talk Title: The Ides of Marx

Paul Wilson lives in Ontario. He taught English in Czechoslovakia from 1967 to 1977, when he was expelled from the country for his association with the banned rock group, The Plastic People of the Universe. He has translated many essays and plays by Václav Havel into English, and he has edited two books of Havel’s speeches and essays, Open Letters (1992) and The Art of the Impossible (1997), both published by Knopf. His most recent translation is a book of short stories by Bohumil Hrabal, called Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, published by New Directions (2015).

Paul Wilson

Michael Žantovský

Michael Žantovský

Talk Title: 1968-1989—From Annus Mirabilis to Annus Horribilis, and Back

Michael Žantovský is the Executive Director of Václav Havel Library in Prague and former President of Aspen Institute Central Europe (2012-2015). Previously, he was the Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United Kingdom (2009-2015), to Israel (2003-2009), and to the United States (1992-1997). In 1989, he was a founding member of the Czech chapter of P.E.N., the international organization of writers and translators that was banned in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era. In November 1989, he was a founding member of the Civic Forum, an umbrella organization that coordinated the overthrow of the Communist regime. In January 1990, he became the Spokesman and Press Secretary for President Václav Havel. In 1996, he was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic and served as the chairman of its Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Security. Žantovský studied psychology at Charles University in Prague and at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and worked as a research psychologist. Beginning in 1980, he worked as a freelance translator and author. He has translated more than 50 works of contemporary English and American fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction. He was a contributor to the samizdat press and the Prague correspondent for Reuters. As a writer, teacher, and translator, Žantovský has continued to pursue his interests in foreign policy and political theory. In 2003, he co-founded the new Prague-based think tank Program of Atlantic Security Studies (PASS) and served as its first Executive Director. In 2014, he published to wide acclaim the biography of the former president (Havel: A Life) in English, Czech, and several other languages.

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