Faculty inspiratorium: Matthew Rampley
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14 April 2023
8:30 AM - meeting room, Arna Nováka 1, Brno, building C, 2nd floor
Do you want to learn more about the faculty's academic community and make new contacts? Are you interested in what colleagues from other departments are working on, or would you like to present your projects? Or do you want to spend a pleasant morning in the company of people with something to say? The new discussion platform Faculty Inspiration is just for you. This time, Matthew Rampley from the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts MU will present the life and career of Alois Musil. How can he be viewed? Can we consider him an imperialist? And what does this say about the Czechs' position in the early 20th-century European colonial system?
Alois Musil: Czech Scholar, Austrian Imperialist: Patriot, Adventurer, Theologian
In this talk I am interested in exploring the questions prompted by consideration of the life and career of Alois Musil (1868–1944). He is understandably celebrated in his home town of Vyškov. A loyal subject of Austria-Hungary, he was the personal confessor to the Empress Zita, and achieved high military distinction due to his contribution to the Habsburg war effort in the Middle East. After 1918, he reinvented himself as a Czech and, despite some opposition, became central to the development of Islamic studies in Prague. He exemplified the shifting identities so characteristic of early twentieth-century central Europe. Yet he left behind a complex legacy, for in many respects he typified the orientalist scholar and agent of imperialism so powerfully described by Edward Said in his famous study Orientalism. How, therefore, might we view him and his work? How justified might we be in viewing Musil, too, as a would-be imperialist? And what does this tell us about the place of Czechs in the European colonial system of the early twentieth century?
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