Karen von Kunes

Karen von Kunes

First Name: 
Karen
Last Name: 
von Kunes
Title: 
Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream
Office Location : 
121 St. Joseph Street, Alumni Hall Room 419, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1J4
Education: 
Postdoctoral Research, Université de Montréal
PhD, McGill University
MBA, University of Texas-Austin
BA, McGill University

People Type:

Research Area:

Areas of Interest: 

Milan Kundera’s existentialism, Milos Forman’s film treatment of mental instability, Czechoslovak New Wave, 19th and 20th century Czech and Slovak literature and film, Innovative approaches to learning Czech.

Courses Taught

SLA105 Elementary Czech
SLA215 Czech and Slovak Culture
SLA225 Czech and Slovak Cinema

Publications

  • Milan Kundera Known and Unknown: Multidimensional Analysis of Selected Works, ed. (Bloomsbury: Literary Studies, 2025)
  • Responsibility vs. Greed for Power: Karel Čapek’s The White Plague in a Cultural Context in Modern Czech Literature Since 1948: The Junction of its Diverging Forces, ed. Andrew Drozd (Vernon Press, 2024)
  • Czech: An Essential Grammar, co-author of the 2nd edition (Routledge, 2021)
  • Václav Havel: The Vaněk’s Plays Audience, Vernisáž, Protest, co-author, The Literary Encyclopedia: Czech and Slovak Writing and Culture (Volume 1.8.1, 2021)
  • Milan Kundera’s Fiction: A Critical Approach to Existential Betrayals (Rowman and Littlefield: Lexington Books, 2019)
  • Among the Sinners, a novel on diaspora (Práh Publishers: International Edition, 2013)
  • Czech Practical Dictionary Czech-English/English-Czech (Hippocrene Books, 2011)
  • An Uneasy Rider: Jacques and His Master in Between Texts, Languages, and Cultures, ed. Craig Cravens, Masako U. Fidler, Susan C. Kresin (Slavica, 2009)
  • The Art of Buffoonery: The Czech Joke à la Commedia dell’arte Style in Kundera’s French Novel Slowness in Critical Essays on Milan Kundera, ed. Peter Petro (G.K. Hall & Co., 1999)
  • Beyond the Imaginable: 240 Ways of Looking at Czech (Práh Publishers, 1999).
  • Barron’s Travel Wise Czech, Editor-in-Chief and author of the translated English edition (Barron’s Educational Series, 1998).
  • 72 Discussions of the Czech Language to Make You Think, Learn and Entertain, in the series Everything You Wanted to Know about Czech and Culture (Práh Publishers, 1995)
  • Adaptation and English translation of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich’s play Svět za mřížemi. In Laurence Senelick’s Cabaret Performance (Johns Hopkins University Press: PAJ Books, 1992)
  • Annotated Bibliography on Czech/Slovak Literary Theory for the years 1984-1985. New Literary History: International Bibliography of Literary Theory and Interpretation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988

Campus: