A series of meetings at the partner Brown University were held on 14–18 October 2024 by a delegation of members of the College led by Dr Eva Lehečková, Dean of CU FA. The university in Providence, Rhode Island, is part of the so-called “Ivy League” of American universities. The visit took place on the occasion of the renewal and extension of the Cooperation Agreement between Brown University and Charles University, in which the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, also participated.
The meeting was also attended by the Vice-Rector for International Affairs of CU, Prof Eva Voldřichová Beránková, and the Head of the International Relations Office of CU, Sylvie Boumová, who together with the delegation from CU visited selected universities on the East Coast of the USA. The meeting was also joined by the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation Marek Ženíšek and representatives of the Czech diplomatic corps in the USA.
“The Faculty of Arts, Charles University, has a long-standing cooperation with Brown University in various fields such as political science, linguistics, psychology, Slavic studies, Egyptology and Assyriology, medieval studies, and Jewish studies. It was evident that our partners particularly appreciate this breadth of our cooperation,” said Eva Lehečková, Dean of CU FA. The extended inter-university agreement allows selected students of MA and PhD programmes at Brown University to take part in research stays over the next five years. These students will receive financial support from Brown University, CU, and CU FA. The agreement also allows lectureships for academics. In addition to the possibilities arising from the inter-university agreement, academics from CU FA and Brown University have developed long-term cooperation based on the already completed project KREAS and are currently working on the CoRe project.
Another employed collaboration with Brown University is Fulbright Scholarships. “In meetings with the representatives of Brown University, we discussed various forms of support for those interested in these forms of academic and student exchange, as well as the possibilities of effective sharing of information about the research focus of academics and announced grant calls. A new topic was the search for intersections of both institutions in reflecting and using the possibilities of digital humanities and AI, for which we agreed to hold a follow-up online meeting of experts and those interested in this issue from both institutions,” said Dr Milan Žonca, Vice-Dean for International Relations of CU FA.
Prof Václav Cvrček, Vice-Dean for Research of CU FA, who has previously been a Fulbright Scholar at Brown University, gave a lecture during the visit as part of the “Brown-Charles Lecture Series” on innovative corpus methods in discourse analysis, which has been developing for a long time with Masako Fidler, Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University.
The Dean of CU FA, Eva Lehečková, and the Vice-Dean of CU FA, Milan Žonca, also arranged a meeting with Bc. Lucie Walzová, a graduate student of Prof Filip Smolík from the Department of Psychology at CU FA, who spends part of the winter semester at Brown University through the inter-university contract. In the laboratory of her mentor, Prof Roman Feiman from the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, she is gaining valuable experience for her research project on the acquisition of numerals of preschool children.
