Czech Staff

Rajendra Chitnis’s research focuses mainly on twentieth-century Czech literature in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. He has written books on how Czech, Russian and Slovak fiction changed after the fall of Communism and on the leading Czech Avant-garde novelist and playwright, Vladislav Vančura, and recently edited a book about how smaller European literatures reach the cultural mainstream through translation. He teaches Czech literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Slovak literature since the nineteenth century, and translation from Czech and Slovak into English.
I currently teach Czech language to students at all levels in Oxford. My principal research area is Czech prose of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular focus on narrative structures and discourse. I have worked on description in Czech 19th century travel writing, and the narrative texts of Richard Weiner (1884-1937). I have also held a long term interest in discourse analysis and text linguistics, and more recently second language acquisition and aspects of bilingualism.