[Introduction of New Faculty Member] KREJCOVA, Jolana, Assistant Professor(non-tenure-track)

Self-introduction

I am Jolana Krejcova, and I am delighted to join the School of International Liberal Studies as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Area Studies. I have been passionate about the Spanish language and the cultures of the Hispanic world since childhood, and I am very much looking forward to sharing this interest with students at SILS.

The courses I will teach at SILS can be broadly divided into two types. The first consists of Spanish language courses at different levels, ranging from complete beginners to advanced students. The second type includes courses based on the reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts in Spanish. The courses aim to foster intercultural communication in Spanish through discussion, while also encouraging a deeper understanding of the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. I believe that learning a foreign language is always closely connected to understanding the culture in which it is rooted, and that studying Hispanic cultures will be particularly engaging in a multicultural environment such as SILS.

Recent Research Interest

My research focuses on Western perceptions of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One strand of my work examines representations and stereotypes of Japan in Western countries. I explore how these images varied across national contexts and, at the same time, reflected broader assumptions about the observers’ own societies and cultures. Another focus of my research is on travellers to Japan who wrote about their experiences. I work primarily with archival sources in order to understand how factors such as gender, social position, religion, and personal background shaped travellers’ encounters with Japan and their subsequent portrayals of Japanese culture. I am particularly interested in the experiences of women travellers, especially those whose works have received little or no scholarly attention.

Profile

I obtained a double bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Studies and Spanish for Intercultural Communication from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. I then completed both my master’s and doctoral studies at the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies at Waseda University. During my doctoral studies, I also completed a master’s programme in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language at the International University of Valencia, Spain. Before joining SILS as an Assistant Professor, I taught Spanish at the Center for Language Education and Research and in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo.