Marek Nekula is professor of Czech and West Slavic Studies at the University of Regensburg and chair of the Bohemicum – Center for Czech Studies since 1998. His research and teaching focus on language contact and multilingualism (including multilingualism in literature), sociolinguistics and language management (language planning) as well as nationalism and memory studies in Central Europe.
His first published monograph deals with the System of (Modal) Particles in German and Czech. He co-edited the Handbook of Czech Grammar, which has since appeared in many editions, and the New Encyclopædic Dictionary of Czech (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster), both of which have received awards by the academic community. His widely read monographs on Franz Kafka’s Languages and Franz Kafka and His Prague Contexts (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster), have been published in Czech, German, English, and French (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster), and were accompanied by the supervision of doctoral theses on the linguistic and cultural contexts of Kafka’s time. His research on the management and results of multilingualism, funded by the German Research Foundation and the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, has resulted in collective monographs and volumes on language management in families, organizations, corporations and companies in Central Europe. Recent related publications include Interests and Power in Language Management (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster) and Sociolinguistics meets Corpus Linguistics (in German (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster)). Grant funding lead to the publication of the monograph Death and Resurrection of a Nation – Pantheon in Czech Literature and Culture (in German (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster) and Czech (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster)) and the co-edited volume Between National and Transnational Memory Narratives in Central Europe (in German (externer Link, öffnet neues Fenster)).
In 2021, he was awarded a doctor honoris causa in modern history by Charles University in Prague, and in 2024 the Danubius Award, funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research, for extraordinary achievements in research on Central Europe.
Education and Academic Career
From 1983 to 1988, Nekula studied Czech and German Philology in Brno and Jena. He received his doctorate with the thesis Expression of Irony from a Pragmalinguistic Point of View (PhDr.). From 1988 to 1989, he was a fellow, and from 1993 to 1995, a senior researcher at the Czechoslovak (later Czech) Academy of Sciences in Prague (Institute of Czech Language, Institute of Philosophy). In 1991, he began his doctoral studies at the Free University Berlin as a DAAD fellow and completed them successfully in 1994 with a doctoral thesis entitled The System of (Modal) Particles in German and Czech. From 1989 to 1993, he worked as an assistant professor at the Institute of German Studies at Charles University in Prague. From 1994 to 1997, he worked as an assistant professor and from 1997 to 1998 as an associate professor at the Institute of Czech Language at Masaryk University in Brno. During his qualifying period, he received support from the DAAD and the Austrian fellowship program DIE AKTION for long-term academic stays in Berlin, Vienna, and Frankfurt/Oder.
Marek Nekula is professor of Czech and West Slavic Studies at the University of Regensburg and chair of the Bohemicum – Center for Czech Studies (from 1998 to 2018 he also chaired the Bohemicum in Passau). He is a member of the Graduate School of East and Southeast European Studies (2012-2020 a board member) and responsible for the Bachelor program "German-Czech Studies" since 2007 and the Master´s program "East European Studies" since 2022.
He was appointed professor of Czech language according to Czech law in 2006. In the spring semesters of 2006 and 2012, he was a Senior and Visiting Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. In the fall semester of 2019, he was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.