11. Lost in the Heart of Europe: Doing Canada Among the Czechs

In 1969 I went to Czechoslovakia intending to spend a year or two teaching English before returning to my home country, Canada. Fifty-three years later I am still here (though now in the Czech Republic). Until 1977 I taught at language schools, since then at Masaryk University, in the country’s “second city,” Brno. Canada was always a natural part of my practical English classes, but in 1985, with the introduction of my first course in Canadian literature, I became a “Canadianist.” Since then, most of my teaching and scholarly work has been devoted to Canada, and I have also played an active role in the development of Canadian Studies internationally. This chapter describes how my involvement as a diasporic Canadian with Canadian Studies has changed over the years, and along with it my relationship to Canada itself—how, moving from isolation to closer personal engagement to a renewed sense of inclusion, it has been shaped by external factors such as the political reality of the Cold War East–West divide, the opening-up following the fall of Communism, Canadian government support for Canadian Studies, the presence of a world-wide community of Canadianists, and globalization and the new media.