Jan Mrazek

Jan Mrázek grew up in Czechoslovakia. As a student of violin at the Conservatory of Prague, he liked to listen to LPs of Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, and soon he began learning to play gamelan with Javanese teachers, in the United States and Indonesia. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he majored in art history, with focus on Southeast Asia; Japanese language and literature was his second major. As a graduate student at Cornell University, he continued to learn about a variety of arts, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the Javanese shadow puppet theatre. His fieldwork involved enjoying many all-night performance-celebrations, chatting with people about them, and learning to perform. As a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University in the Netherlands (1998-2001), he studied the interaction between Indonesian traditional performing arts and modern media, such as television and the internet, and later taught courses on South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of Washington, Seattle.He started to teach at NUS in June 2003, attracted by the location in Southeast Asia and the Department’s post-disciplinary potential. In addition to continuing to learn about Southeast Asian arts,  his research has focused on travel and travel writing, with focus on Czechs who travelled to Southeast Asia in the colonial period. To understand them better, and to feel how the world does and does not change, he has travelled widely in their footsteps in the region, as well as voyaging by the container ship The Titan from Rotterdam to Singapore. In part stemming from that experience is his research interest in maritime and archipelagic life-worlds. In teaching, he tries to encourage students to enjoy and value learning, thinking, and living as much as he does, to find their own voice and rhythm in this rushing world, to be wary of loud authoritative voices and values, and to take their learning experience out of the conventional classroom: his courses involve fieldtrip to SE Asian countries, playing music, seafaring, fiction writing, and work with visual media.He continues to enjoy playing gamelan music with the NUS Gamelan Ensemble (which he established when he came to NUS), living in Singapore and travelling in its neighbourhood. Among his recent books are Wayang & Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the Internet (NUS Press 2019) and a study centering on the Czech poet Konstantin Biebl’s journey to Java,  On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry (Karolinum, Charles University, 2022), as well as the edited volume Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia (Central European University Press, 2024). His recent articles/chapters (some available on researchgate.net and/or academia.edu) include “José Rizal on Ships and Trains: Dreams, Timetables, Nightmares,” in Transport Revolution and Travels to Asia, 1860s-1920s; “Returns to the Wide World: Errant Bohemian Images of Race and Colonialism” (Studies in Travel Writing 21/2 [June 2017]: 135-55), “Czech Tropics” (Archipel 86 [2013]: 155-190), “The Prison and the Sea” (Suvannabhumi 11/1 [Jan 2019]:7-40), “Czechs on Ships: Liners, Containers and the Sea,” (Journal of Tourism History 13/2 [2021]), and “Primeval Forest, Homeland, Catastrophe: Travels in Malaya and ‘Modern Ethnology’ with Pavel Šebesta / Paul Schebesta” (Anthropos 116/1-2 [2021]. Jan Mrázek is the founding director of the NUS Singa Nglaras Gamelan Ensemble.