On Saturday 14th May 2016 it was exactly 700 years since the birth of Charles IV, the Bohemian king and Roman emperor, who founded Charles University in Prague on 7th April 1348. In the spring of the same year, Charles IV also published the foundation charter (8th March 1348) and laid the first stone of the walls of the new city of Prague (26th March 1348).

On the 28th of March 2018, Professor Chet Van Duzer from the Stanford University (California, US) presented the guest lecture “With Savage Pictures Fill their Gaps: Cartographer’s Fears of Blank Spaces” at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts‘ central library.

“My dear audience,” the first words spoken by Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in his lecture in the full-to-bursting Blue Lecture Hall, provoked a positive reaction. Opening the seminar on particle physics for secondary schools, Heuer emphasised that, even though a small country, the Czech Republic is a very important partner in the CERN project.

December 10 marks exactly sixty years that Czech scientist and inventor Jaroslav Heyrovský was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His main area of work was in polarography. Associate Professor Jiří Barek discusses the chemist’s success and invaluable contribution.

Man-made Man – Technology and Medicine is an exhibition which has been on at the National Technical Museum in Prague for ten months and shall end on May 27, 2018. This exhibition, which was prepared in co-operation with Charles University and the National Medical Library of the Czech Republic, explores the advancement that humans have made with prosthesis and all other uses of technological substitutes across various fields of medicine.

There have been few times in my life where I have felt a single talk, lecture, or presentation has drastically changed my worldview. The lecture, “Syria, What’s Going On?” by Alejandro Gutierrez had this effect on me, and I believe many other students in attendance.

Israeli writer Shani Boianjiu is no ordinary 25 year old. Born in Jerusalem and raised on the Israeli-Lebanese border where, she tells us, school would often be cancelled due to conflict. Today, she possesses a bestselling novel, Harvard degree, numerous literacy recognitions, and extensive experience in the Israeli military under her belt.

The 2015 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Jan Švejnar, the James T. Shotwell Professor of Global Political Economy and Director of the Center on Global Economic Governance at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, New York and a chairman of the Executive and Supervisory Committee of CERGE-EI in Prague. Czech economist was recognized for his work on economic issues in labor, development and the transition from socialist to market economies.

Many of you may recall the news coverage of the Russian annexation of parts of the Ukraine last year. This week on the 19th October the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University hosted a lecture given by Mr Steven Pifer, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine, regarding Russia’s aggressive policies, which saw Russia act in an aggressive manner not seen since the years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

This year marks the 25th year of the American semester – an annual exchange program between Charles University's Faculty of Science and one of the most prestigious American universities, Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA). Roughly halfway through the program, on May 3rd – 4th, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the program with a number of events for faculty and the general public.

On 14 May, priest of the academic parish and professor of the CU Faculty of Arts Tomáš Halík received the prestigious Templeton Prize, which is awarded for exceptional contributions to the development of the spiritual dimension of life. The ceremony, held in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, was also attended by the Rector of Charles University, Professor Tomáš Zima, Czech Minister for Culture Daniel Herman and Cardinals Dominik Duka and Miloslav Vlk.

Despite being one of the most secular countries in the world, the Czech Republic's Easter traditions remain strong. Egg painting, singing and gatherings all seem to be in store for this spring celebration, but no church? I went along to a Czech Easter afternoon at the Faculty of Arts to find out if this was true.

The editorial team of the Forum magazine is publishing its summary of the past year for the second time. Last year’s summary paid tribute to the largely unsung and unseen staff at the Rectorate without whom the university could not function, This year Forum magazine decided to pay tribute to a dozen significant personalities on the Czech scientific scene. Once again a non-traditional method was chosen to profile them.

There are three institutes dedicated to the study of Archaeology at Charles University in Prague; all a member of the Faculty of Arts. The Czech Institute of Egyptology is world-famous due to its numerous important discoveries in Egypt and Sudan, whilst the Institute of (Prehistoric and Medieval) Archaeology is the most active of the three when speaking of the excavations running in the Czech Republic itself.

Erasmus has its fifteen minutes of fame in the award-winning Czech film Revival, starring two ex-Charles University students from Finland, Siiri Lehtonen and Aleksi Korpijaakko. Given an official rating of 7/10 on the accredited IMDB film reviewing site and labeled the “Czech comedy of the summer” by Cineuropa, I was expecting some good stuff and was not disappointed.

The CU has been fortunate to host some very active Erasmus students, who has – next to the obligatory attending classes, socializing with their Erasmus peers and exploring Prague and the Czech Republic – found also the time for an internship or voluntary project while studying in the Czech Republic.

On an uncharacteristically snowy April 14th, Sacha Prechal, a judge of the Court of Justice of the EU, came to the Faculty of Law to lecture on the cooperation between the national courts and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). Prechal, who assumed her role as judge with the CJEU in 2010, immediately began discussing the core topics that emerge when considering the interaction between the courts of member states and their EU counterpart.

On the 14th April 2016, I attended a guest lecture in the Faculty of Arts of CU on the ‘Wasteland in Cities from the Middle Ages to the Present’ by Peter Clark, a professor of European urban history at the University of Helsinki.

In the first half of November 2016, by the occasion of this year’s Hieronymus’s Days dedicated to interpretation and translation skills, the Czech Union of Interpreters and Translators (Jednota tlumočníků a překladatelů, Czech acronym JTP) invited Barbara Delahayes from the University of Geneva to present a new piece of carefully designed software which could prove to be vitally important in the current refugee crisis.

On the 12th, 13th, and 21st of December 2014, students from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University put on a production of ‘Blithe Spirit’ by Noel Coward, directed by Eva Bilská, a PhD student at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.