From 1 February 2022, the UP Faculty of Arts (UP FA) will be headed by Associate Professor of History Jan Stejskal. The decision was made by the members of the UP FA Academic Senate at the election session on 13 October. The current chairperson of the senate and former head of the UP FA Department of History was the only candidate to run for the 2022–2026 term.
Stejskal received the necessary majority of votes in the first round, with 18 senators voting for his election. “Thank you for your votes of confidence. Let me just say that I am a man of consensus, a parliamentarian. Things will be negotiated at our faculty, they will be done after joint deliberation, nothing will be forcefully implemented. I look forward to working together in the years to come and may we all thrive here – our faculty is worth it," said Jan Stejskal following his election win.
At the same time, he assured his audience that he was going to resign from the position of the chairperson of the UP FA Academic Senate, which he currently holds for the second term. Therefore, the Senate will hold another election at its next meeting, which will take place on 10 November, this time to elect a new chairperson.
Jan Stejskal will take the helm of the faculty on 1 February 2022, after being appointed by the UP rector. He will replace Prof Zdeněk Pechal from the Department of Slavonic Studies at the UP Faculty of Arts, who took over the leadership of the faculty in 2018. Associate Professor Stejskal had been nominated as a candidate for dean in that election, but he declined to run. This time however, he was the only one who agreed to run in the current election.
As dean, he wants to put emphasis on the development of a friendly and safe environment for study and work, the promotion of doctoral studies, better use of the potential of institutional accreditation, further cultivation of internationalisation as well as project and grant activities, digitalisation of the study and personnel paperwork, and the promotion of sustainability at the faculty.
Jan Stejskal (b. 1970) graduated from the UP Faculty of Arts and Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. He continued his postgraduate studies at the Institute of History at the Czech Academy of Sciences and at the UP Faculty of Arts. He also gained experience and valuable contacts during his internships at the International Medieval Institute, the University of Leeds, and the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Before he started working at the UP FA Department of History, he worked as an archivist and information analyst at Radio Free Europe. He has been employed at the UP FA Department of History since 1999, being its head from 2014 to 2018. He was appointed Associate Professor of History in 2009. His professional work focusses mainly on the late medieval period, the history of monasticism, and Italian humanism of the 15th century. He is a member of the UP FA Scholarly Board as well as several disciplinary boards at UP FA and at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pardubice, and an evaluator of the National Accreditation Bureau for Higher Education.
