Selected Articles

I am currently working on articles for the Routledge History of Communism ("Dissent") and the Cambridge Companion to Global Cold War Literature ("Pathways of the Political Novel During the Cold War").

  • "Prove You're Not a Robot: On Karel Čapek's R.U.R." Los Angeles Review of Books, February 20, 2024.
  • "A Guest from the Unknown: Antigone and Jan Patočka's Cultural Criticism." Bohemica Litteraria 23 (2020): 13-23.
  • "Ivan Olbracht's Nikola the Outlaw." Public Books, Sept. 6, 2018. Reprinted in B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites, ed. John Plotz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 128-133,
  • “The Shaman, the Greengrocer, and ‘Living in Truth,’” East European Politics, Societies, and Cultures(special issue devoted to essays from the above volume), 32:2 (May 2018): 255-265.

  • “Palmy za polárním kruhem: O nesamozřejmosti samizdatu v Ledererových Českých rozhovorech" [Palm Trees Above the Arctic Circle: The Uncertainty of Samizdat in Jiří Lederer’s Czech Conversations].” Česká literatura (Prague), 6/2016: 896-906.

  • “Šaman, zelinář a ‚život v pravdě‘“ [The Shaman, the Greengrocer, and ‘Living in Truth’],” in Jednoho dne se v našem zelináři cosi vzbouří. Eseje o Moci bezmocných [One day something in our greengrocer snaps…: Essays on Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”], eds. Jiří Suk and Kristina Andělová (Prague: Institute of Contemporary History, 2016).

  • "Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy's Afghanistan." In The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe: Re-Imagining Space, History and Memory, eds. Derek Sayer and Dariusz Gafijczuk (Palgrave, 2013): 205-226.

  • "Ruins of a Republic: Czech Modernism After Munich, 1938-1939." In Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010): 118-132.

  • "Czech Literature" (roundtable on East Central European literatures since the fall of Communism), East European Politics and Societies 23:4 (November 2009): 561-563.
  • "The Senses of Displacement: Ivan Wernisch's Dramatic Monologues." In Between Texts, Languages, and Cultures: A Festschrift for Michael Henry Heim, eds. Craig Cravens, Masako U. Fidler, and Susan C. Kresin (Slavica, 2008): 227-42. [A Czech translation of this article appeared as "Smysl dezorientace: dramatické monology Ivana Wernische," trans. Dalibor Dobiáš, in Krajiny češtiny (Prague) (December 2009): 27-41.]
  • "Czech Literature." 4500-word article on Czech-Jewish literature from its beginnings to the present, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (print and electronicversions), editor-in-chief Gershon David Hundert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). I also wrote the Encyclopedia's author entries on František GellnerEgon Hostovský,Ivan OlbrachtJiří OrtenRoman JakobsonJiří WeilRichard Weiner, and Julius Zeyer.
  • "Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau." In Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions. Ed. Andreas Schonle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006): 322-344.
  • "Promĕny bytu: Metamorfózy soukromého prostoru v české literatuře. [What Lies in Wait Behind the Wall: Metamorphoses of Domestic Space in Czech Literature]." Svĕt literatury (Prague), 16.34 (Fall 2006): 120-134.
  • "Reading Michal Ajvaz." Context 17 (spring 2005).
  • "Mourning Becomes the Nation: The Funeral of Tomáš Masaryk in 1937.” Bohemia 45.1 (2004): 115-131.
  • "Josef Bor." Holocaust Novelists (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 299), ed. Efraim Sicher (Detroit: Gale, 2004): 58-64.
  • "Reading Patrik Ouředník." Context 15 (spring 2004).
  • “Elegie veřejné a soukromé: Melancholie u Seiferta, Ortena a Blatného [Public and Private Elegies:  Melancholy in Seifert, Orten, and Blatný].” Česká literatura (Prague), 49.2 (2001): 128-143.

  • “Volný verš v Seifertově poezii dvacátých let [Free Verse in Seifert’s Poetry of the 1920’s].” In Šnykerikyk [Festschrift for Professor Miroslav Červenka], eds. Jitka Bednářová and Dalibor Dobiáš (Brno:  Host, 1998): 72-81.

  •  “Rozházené údy Jana Zábrany [Jan Zábrana’s Scattered Limbs (on the diaries of Czech poet Jan Zábrana)].”  Tvar (Prague), 6.1 (12 January 1995): 11.