The Catalan degree at Masaryk University in Brno celebrates ten years

Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, hosted a celebratory event for the Catalan language and literature degree on the 4th of March, in commemoration of its tenth anniversary this academic year. The degree started in the 2015–2016 academic term, is one of the few outside the linguistic domain of Catalan dedicated to this language, and it is the only one that studies it exclusively and not combined with another language.

The event began with the speeches by Lucie Kuzmová, the current coordinator of the programme; Ivo Buzek, Head of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Josep-Anton Fernàndez, Director of the Language and Universities Area of the Ramon Llull Institute. This Catalan institution, which already promoted the creation of the degree ten years ago, has since collaborated to maintain such a particular qualification within the Czech university system.

The academic part of the event was led by Elga Cremades and Alfons Gregori. Elga Cremades is a senior lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands and was formerly the Catalan lecturer at Masaryk University; she was in fact the person in charge of the degree's implementation. Cremades presented a study of morphosyntactic errors based on a corpus of exams from students of Catalan as an additional language. Alfons Gregori is head of the Catalan Studies Area at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and a specialist in non-mimetic literature. His lecture dealt with the latest trends in fantastic fiction in Catalan.

Afterwards, Pavlína Javorová-Švandová, the most experienced lecturer of the degree, and Jiří Pešek, the current lecturer, gave an overview of the history of Catalan language at the institution. Catalan arrived at Masaryk University thanks to David Utrera, who in the 1990s, while studying Czech at the university, volunteered at the Department of Romance Languages to teach Catalan courses. Thus, the first Catalan language courses at Masaryk University began in 1998, proving a success in both participation and evaluation – a fact that prompted the expansion of the programme: courses in culture, literature and even cinema soon joined those centred in the language. During the 2003-2004 academic year, these studies became part of the Xarxa Llull, a worldwide network of Catalan studies, a collaboration that was decisive in converting them into a full degree twelve years later.

The event concluded on a more cultural note with two fantastic performances. On the one hand, the writer Lluís-Anton Baulenas offered the poetry reading “Poesia d’amor i de testimoni” (“Poetry of Love and Testimony”), based on texts by Catalan poets Salvat-Papasseit, Brossa, Ferrater and the French Boris Vian. On the other hand, the Catalan-Czech musician Arnau Petřivalský, accompanied at the piano by Zuzana Krumlová, performed several pieces by composers Mompou, Toldrà and Granados.