Professor Jaroslav Peprník, a prominent Czech scholar in English and American Studies, author of many monographs and textbooks on the English-speaking world and the English language, one of the founders of the Department of English and American Studies in Olomouc, has been granted the František Palacký Prize. He received this prestigious Palacký University award in the Corpus Christi Chapel in the UP Arts Centre from UP Rector Michael Kohajda.
This was only the thirteenth time Palacký University has awarded the František Palacký Prize. This time it was given to Prof Jaroslav Peprník, a distinguished Czech philologist and linguist. He has been active in three areas: teaching, writing textbooks, and collecting materials on the history of contacts between Czechs and English-speaking countries. One of the striking aspects of his professional activity is his extensive, far-ranging knowledge of the literatures and cultures of the English-speaking countries. Due to his work in the field of lexicology, he is one of the leading Czech experts in this linguistic discipline. For a long time, English classes in Czech universities and secondary schools were dependent on Prof Peprník’s textbooks.
Peprník received the František Palacký Prize during a ceremonial meeting of the Palacký University scholarly boards and academic senates, on the occasion of the 227th anniversary of the Palacký’s birth, a historian and leading figure in the Czech National Revival. In Peprník’s speech saturated with life experience, he recalled some of his teachers and students and commented on the circumstances that brought him to English studies, emphasising the importance of humility, which is, according to him, essential for mastering English.
“Thank you so much for the František Palacký Prize! I am proud that seventy-one years of my life have been closely linked to Palacký University, and I am also very happy that I have been able to spend the last third of my life without fear, with freedom of speech and the freedom to travel. Let us not take freedom for granted! During the era of ‘normalisation’ after the year 1968, one Austrian friend of mine told me: ‘I thank God that I was not born seventy kilometres further north.’ So let us thank Destiny that we were not born in Bangladesh or eastern Ukraine,” said the award recipient, who has served for one hundred and twenty-four semesters and has been going to his office at Olomouc’s university for seventy-one years.
According to Jan Stejskal, Dean of the Palacký University Faculty of Arts, who delivered a laudation to this year’s laureate in the Corpus Christi Chapel, Prof Peprník is an exceptional person whose life path, scholarly work, and educational activities have been not only an inspiration, but also proof that kindness, perseverance, and love for one’s discipline can overcome even the most difficult obstacles.
“His path to English Studies was guided not only by the school curriculum, but above all by his personal passion. He began studying English as a self-taught student, inspired by adventure stories from English-speaking countries that he discovered in his father’s library. This intrinsic motivation has accompanied him throughout his life and has become the basis of his extraordinary teaching and research career,” said Stejskal. He also recalled Peprník’s secondary school period, during which he had to work in the Bučovice aircraft factory and experienced dramatic moments during a bombing, as well his stay in England in 1948, where he studied and travelled. He mentioned the following political events due to which Peprník was assigned after his graduation to the infamous Technical Auxiliary Battalions, where he spent four years in harsh conditions as a “politically suspect person”. In this context, he praised Prof Peprník’s belief in democratic values and his love for his profession.
The ceremony was attended by academic staff of Palacký University as well as other universities, and the representatives of the City of Olomouc, the Olomouc Region, and Hodslavice, František Palacký’s birthplace. When presenting the award, UP Rector Michael Kohajda also emphasised the laureate’s diligence. “Professor Peprník has made an indelible mark in the history of our university and in the hearts of many generations of students and colleagues. His work is both academically admirable and humanly inspiring. With his erudition, humility, and passion for language, he has encouraged hundreds of students, many of whom are now educators themselves,” he said.
Jaroslav Peprník (b. 1927) graduated in English and History at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno. His dissertation (1950) was entitled Nominal Tendencies in Modern English Prose. Since 1954 he has been working at the UP Faculty of Arts in Olomouc. At the Department of English and American Studies, he specialises in contemporary English, particularly lexicology. Peprník’s first university textbook Angličtina pro lékaře [English for Physicians, 1966] was republished several times and used also at the Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague. This was followed by the textbook Angličtina pro filology I–II [English for Philologists I–II. 1984, 1987]. Thanks to his work on the Slovník amerikanismů [Dictionary of American Usage], he was the only Czech professor to receive a Fulbright scholarship in 1969, with a six-month stay in the USA. Another successful textbook was Angličtina pro jazykové školy [English for Language Schools]. It was not until 1986 that he was able to obtain the academic degree of “candidate of philological sciences”, on the basis of his candidate dissertation Sémantika pojmenování barev v angličtině a češtině [The Semantics of Naming Colours in English and Czech]. He was not habilitated as associate professor until after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. His professional work has focused on research of the contacts between the Czech lands and the English-speaking world, culminating in the publications Anglie očima české literatury [England through the Eyes of Czech Literature, 2001], Amerika očima české literatury [America through the Eyes of Czech Literature, 2002], Češi a anglofonní svět: kontakty a percepce [The Czechs and the English-speaking World: Contacts and Perceptions, 2012], and Anglofonní svět a Češi [The English-speaking World and the Czechs, 2016]. His works for the general public include the history book Británie a USA: Ilustrované reálie [Great Britain and the United States: Illustrated Facts, 2004] and an anthology of short texts from The Times of London, called Journalistic English (2005). After 1990, he devoted great efforts to the revision of English passages in Oldřich Švarný’s textbook Hovorová čínština v příkladech [Conversational Chinese via Examples] and a revision of Velký česko-anglický slovník [Large Czech-English Dictionary] by Josef Fronek. In 2021, UP Press published his memoirs Vzpomínky anglisty [Memoirs of an English Studies Scholar].
Jaroslav Peprník is the holder of several awards. In 2003 he received the City of Olomouc Award, and in 2023 he received the highest ministerial award, the first-degree medal, which was granted to him by the Czech Minister of Education, Youth and Sports at Palacký University. Prof Peprník’s entire speech is available here.
The František Palacký Prize honours outstanding creative activities in the fields of science and culture, which have contributed to the prestige of the Czech Republic and Palacký University Olomouc. It was established on the occasion of the bicentennial of František Palacký’s birth in 1998. Ever since its establishment and its first bestowal, the birthplace of František Palacký, the village of Hodslavice, and the town of Neratovice, where František Palacký often stayed, have been cooperating with Palacký University Olomouc. It is awarded on behalf of Palacký University, usually once every two years, by the UP Rector. This year, the František Palacký Prize was awarded for the thirteenth time. Among the winners to date are the American Studies scholar and UP rector emeritus Josef Jařab, Tomáš Josef Cardinal Špidlík, expert on Constitutional Law Pavel Rychetský, and prominent Czech historian and art and architecture theoretician Rostislav Švácha.
