FASS Staff Profile

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR JAN MRAZEK
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

Appointment:
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Office:
AS3/06-07
Email:
seajm@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
65164912
Fax:
Homepage:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/seajm/
Tabs

Brief Introduction

Jan Mrázek (aka Pak Jan) grew up in Czechoslovakia. As a student of violin at the Conservatory of Prague, he liked to listen to LPs of Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, and soon he began learning to play gamelan with Javanese teachers, in the United States and Indonesia. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he majored in art history, with focus on Southeast Asia; Japanese language and literature was his second major. At Cornell University, he continued to learn about a variety of arts, and wrote his PhD dissertation on the Javanese shadow puppet theatre. His fieldwork involved enjoying many all-night performance-celebrations, chatting with people about them, and learning to perform. As a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands (1998-2001), he studied the interaction between Indonesian traditional performing arts and modern media, such as television and the internet, and later taught courses on South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of Washington, Seattle.

He started to teach at NUS in August 2003, attracted by the location in Southeast Asia and the Department’s post-disciplinary potential. In addition to continuing to learn about Southeast Asian arts, in the last decade his research has focused on travel and travel writing, with focus on Czechs who travelled to Southeast Asia in the colonial period. To understand them better, and to feel how the world does and does not change, he has travelled widely in their footsteps in the region, as well as voyaging by the container ship The Titan from Rotterdam to Singapore. In part stemming from that experience is his research interest in maritime and archipelagic life-worlds. In teaching, he tries to encourage students to enjoy and value learning, thinking, and living, to find their own voice and rhythm in this rushing world, to be wary of loud authoritative voices and values, and to take their learning experience out of the conventional classroom: his courses involve playing music, seafaring and other travel in the region, fiction writing, and work with visual media. He continues to enjoy playing gamelan music with the NUS Gamelan Ensemble (which he established when he came to NUS), living in Singapore and travelling in its neighbourhood.

Pak Jan's most recent books are On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry (Karolinum Press, 2022) and Wayang & Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the Internet (NUS Press 2019). The edited volume Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia  is forthcoming from the CEU Press in December 2023. He has also translated Czech poetry and poetic texts about Java into Indonesian language, and together with Zen Hae and Michala Adnyani, he collaborated on the bilingual publication Pojedu jednou na dalekou Jávu / Suatu Hari Aku akan Pergi ke Jawa yang Jauh (Bohemindo, 2022).  Among his recent articles (some available on Researchgate and/or Academia.edu) are “Returns to the Wide World: Errant Bohemian Images of Race and Colonialism” (Studies in Travel Writing 21/2 [June 2017]: 135-55), “Czech Tropics” (Archipel 86 [2013]: 155-190), “The Prison and the Sea” (Suvannabhumi 11/1 [Jan 2019]:7-40), "Czechs on Ships: Liners, Containers and the Sea," (Journal of Tourism History 13/2 [2021]), and "Primeval Forest, Homeland, Catastrophe: Travels in Malaya and 'Modern Ethnology' with Pavel Šebesta / Paul Schebesta" (Anthropos 116/1-2 [2021]); click Selected Publications tab or check Researchgate / Academia.edu for more. 

Jan Mrázek is the founding director of the NUS Singa Nglaras Gamelan Ensemble.


Teaching Areas

Southeast Asian visual and performing arts

Javanese gamelan performance

Travel literature on Southeast Asia

Seafaring

Modern media in SE Asia

Sea, islands, vessels -- including seafaring voyages

Southeast Asian Studies "theory and practice"


Research Interests

  • Travel and travel writing
  • Southeast Asia and Central/Eastern Europe
  • Indonesian culture, performing and material/visual arts, modern media
  • Archipelagos, sea, seafaring
  • Jungles, gardens, tropical nature
  • Gamelan practice, context and history
  • Wayang kulit

Selected Publications

Single-Authored Books

 On This Modern Highway, Lost in the Jungle: Tropics, Travel, and Colonialism in Czech Poetry , Karolinum Press, 2022. 

 Wayang & Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the Internet, NUS Press, 2019. 349p.

Phenomenology of a Puppet Theater: Contemplations on the Art of Contemporary Javanese Wayang Kulit, KITLV Press, Leiden, 2005. 587pp.

Edited Volumes

 Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia , CEU Press, forthcoming in 2023.

(co-editor/author/translator, with Zen Hae and Michala Adnyani), Pojedu jednou na dalekou Jávu / Suatu Hari Aku akan Pergi ke Jawa yang Jauh. Bohemindo, 2022. 

(with Morgan Pitelka), What's the Use of Art? Asian Art and Material Culture in Context. Hawaii University Press 2008. 318pp.

Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia: New Approaches to Performance-Events, Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 2003.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Note: Some of the texts listed below are available on Researchgate and/or  Academia.edu.

 “A Czech Army Doctor in Sumatra: Native Soil, Miasmatic Mud, Russian Hallucinations, All The Empires,” in Jan Mrázek, ed.,  Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia , forthcoming in 2023.

“Primeval Forest, Homeland, Catastrophe: Travels in Malaya and ‘Modern Ethnology’ with Pavel Šebesta / Paul Schebesta,” 2 Parts, Anthropos 116, nos. 1 and 2, June and December 2021.

“Czechs on Ships: Liners, Containers and the Sea.” Journal of Tourism History 13/2,  2021: 1-27. DOI: 10.1080/1755182X.2021.1925359.

“The Prison and the Sea,” Suvannabhumi: International Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11/1, January 2019.

“Returns to the Wide World: Errant Bohemian Images of Race and Colonialism,” Studies in Travel Writing 21/2 (June 2017): 135-55.

“A Sea of Honey: The Speaking Voice in the Javanese Shadow Puppet Theatre,” Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience, ed. B. Macpherson & K. Thomaidis. Routledge, 2015, 64-76.

“Czech Tropics,” Archipel 86 (2013): 155-190.

“The Visible and the Invisible in a Southeast Asian World,” A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, ed. Deborah Hutton & Rebecca Brown, Blackwell Publishing 2011, 97-120.

“Xylophones in Thailand and Java: A Comparative Phenomenology of Musical Instruments,” Asian Music 39-2 (2008): 59-107.

“Ways of Experiencing Art: Javanese Shadow Puppets in Art History, in Performance, and on Television,” in What's the Use of Art? Asian Art and Material Culture in Context, Hawaii University Press 2008, pp.272-304.

“Heri Dono's Moving Pictures: Painting, Puppets, Performance,” in The Inoyama Donation: Tale of Two Artists (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2006), pp.12-18.

 “Masks and Selves in Contemporary Java: the Dances of Didik Nini Thowok,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 36 (2), June 2005, pp. 249-279.

“To Be Or Not To Be There: Watching Theatrical Performances on Television,” in Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia: New Approaches to Performance-Events (see above), pp.333-61.

“An Introduction: One Perspective on the Variety of Perspectives,” in Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia: New Approaches to Performance-Events (see above), pp.1-38.

“A Musical Picture of Indonesia,” Indonesia 71 (April 2001), pp.187-210.

“The Importance of Being Crazy: New Trends in Music for Wayang Accompaniment,” in Seleh Notes (London, UK), Volume 7, Number 3 (June 2000), pp.4-6.

“More Than a Picture: The Instrumental Quality of the Shadow Puppet,” in Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O'Connor, Nora Taylor, ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2000), pp.49-73.

“Javanese Wayang Kulit in the Times of Comedy: Clown Scenes, Innovation, and the Performance’s Being in the Present World,” Part One and Two, Indonesia no.68 (October 1999), pp.38-128; and no. 69 (April 2000), pp. 107-172.

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