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hjires@hotmail.com
Jan Jireš is a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations for the academic year of 2008-2009 and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Charles University in Prague.
In 2000, Jan spent one month as an intern at the Centre for European Security Studies (CESS) in Groningen, Netherlands. In 2003, he studied international relations at the University of Tampere, Finland. Between 2002 and 2004, he worked with the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) on a research project mapping the post-Cold War security sector reforms in Central and Eastern Europe.
His Masters thesis analyzed the evolution of the Finnish foreign and security policy after the Cold War and, in particular, the changing nature of the country‘s neutrality.
After graduating from Political Science and History in 2004, Jan started teaching security studies at the Charles University as an assistant professor. At the same time, he joined the Prague-based public policy and regulatory consultancy firm Candole Partners, advising major European and U.S. companies on how to navigate the jungle of the Czech political and regulatory environment. In 2007, he was promoted to the position of managing director of the firm’s Prague office.
However, after some time Jan realized that he needed to make a clear choice between a business career and an academic career as pursuing both turned out to be unsustainable, considering one day has a mere 24 hours. He opted for the academia and applied for the Fulbright scholarship.
Jan’s dissertation deals with the reception of the idea of “Central Europe” (as something profoundly different from “Eastern Europe”) in the U.S. after the Cold War. He aims at uncovering the “mental maps” in the heads of American foreign policy-makers, experts, academicians and journalists. His goal is not to describe the actual U.S. policy towards Central Europe but rather to focus on the history (and future) of an idea: Have the Americans accepted the idea of Central Europe as drawn in the 1970s by intellectuals such as Milan Kundera and Czeslaw Milosz and later made the cornerstone of the post-communist foreign and security policies of the Central European countries? In which way have the Americans defined this region geographically and how this evolved? Which attributes and values have the Americans associated with “Central Europe”? How have the competing U.S. foreign political camps/traditions perceived the idea of Central Europe and understood the region‘s position and role in the "American world" after the Cold War?
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