Department of East Asian Studies
Department of East Asian Studies forms a part of the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia. It is the only department with Chinese Studies program, Japanese Studies program and Korean Studies program in Slovakia. The department was officially established in 1994 as Department of Languages and Cultures of the Countries of East Asia. However, already in 1986 for the first time Japanese studies and subsequently in 1988 Chinese studies were established at the Comenius University. At that time these two programs were – due to administrative reasons – part of the Department of English and American Studies. In June 2008, the Academic Senate of the Faculty of Arts approved the change of the name of our department. The current name, Department of East Asian Studies, better reflects the pedagogic and research focus of the department, which is an interdisciplinary approach to China, Japan and Korea respectively. With the support of Korea Foundation a Korean language lectorate was established at our department in February 2009. In September 2012 the B.A. Program Korean Studies was launched for the first time.
The Department has three sections, namely Chinese studies, Japanese studies and Korean Studies. Starting from 2011 The B.A. program Japanese Studies will accept students every odd year (2015, 2017, …) while the B.A. program Chinese Studies will start every even year (2014, 2016, …).
The head of the department is prof. Mgr. Jana Benická, Ph.D. In the Chinese studies section of the department the staff includes one professor (Prof. Jana Benická, Ph.D.); associate professors (Ľuboš Gajdoš, Ph.D.; doc. M. A. Sascha Klotzbücher, Ph.D.; doc. Mgr. Rong Ye, Ph.D.), assistant professor (Daniela Zhang Cziráková, PhD.) and one Chinese language lecturer (Zhang Yihong, Ph.D.). There are four teachers in the Japanese section: assistant professors (František Paulovič, Ph.D., Lena Králiková Hashimoto, Ph.D.) and two lecturers (Hana Bogdanová, M.A., Mgr. Akiko Komura, Ph.D.). The Korean studies section consists of the visiting prof. Sang-hyun Shin, M.Ed, two assistant professors (Miloš Procházka, Ph.D.; Dr. phil. Marianne Jung, BA MA).
Currently (spring 2023), there are about 120 students studying at the department. The curriculum is divided into two parts: four years for the B.A. level and two years for the M.A. level.
The department is cooperating with other academic institutions with similar focus in the European Union within the Erasmus+ and CEEPUS networks. This cooperation enables the student to spend a semester abroad (Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Romania). Besides students’ mobility, these cooperation networks give us the opportunity to invite visiting professors to our department. Thanks to the agreement between the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic and its counterpart in the People’s Republic of China, students of the Chinese studies have the opportunity to spend one year of their studies at a Chinese university studying Chinese language and culture. The student exchange with Japanese universities is supported by university-level contracts with the Waseda University and the Shizuoka University and a faculty-level contract with the Ferris University in Yokohama. It enables the best students to study in Japan. The best students of the Korean Studies program have the opportunity to spend one or two semesters in the Republic of Korea.
The Department holds library holdings related to Japanese studies, Korean Studies and Chinese studies. Besides books in Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, the library holdings include academic literature in Western languages.
Since 2002 the Department of East Asian Studies has launched the publication of the peer-reviewed academic journal Studia Orientalia Slovaca which is a multidisciplinary journal which focuses on various fields of Asian studies. The journal is published twice a year (since 2010) with contributions in mainly in English, with some articles in Slovak, and Czech languages.