Office for Research and Development
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Asian Philology and Asian Studies
Asian Philology and Asian Studies are developed at Masaryk University within the Centre for Asian Studies and the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages. This interdisciplinary field covers the entire area of central and eastern Asia, including Siberia and Southeast Asia. The research focuses mainly on China and its border areas. It also concerns China’s neighbouring states, Japan and Vietnam; inter-ethnic language contacts; and the historical, social, and economic context of the development of local nations. The research is regularly combined with the use of field research methods.
Philology, texts, and culture
Altai and Central Asian Philology form the core of Asian studies within the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages. In response to Pavel Poucha, the research is dedicated to Altai linguistics, Mongolian palaeography, the history of Mongolia and Central Asia, Tocharian and Iranian studies, Indology, and the study of languages within Chinese and Siberian cultural environments. Within the Centre for Asian Studies, various areas of Chinese and Japanese studies are developed, with the focus on Chinese thought and literature and cognitive linguistics. The Japanese Studies Seminar that is taught in the Centre for Asian Studies focuses on the philological research of Japanese life and culture, particularly Japanese cognitive linguistics, classical Japanese, theory and history of theatre, literature, poetry, and drama, religion, Buddhist thought, and medieval Buddhist texts.
International cooperation
The individual departments successfully develop relations with other countries. This development is closely connected to the active support of international student and teacher exchanges at partner universities. It also includes about a dozen international projects and publications: Japanese Noh Drama - a Genre in Development (2010), Tocharian Studies (2011), History of Mongolia (2015), and others. The research is also related to the preparation of new fields in Asian studies, i.e. Korean and Vietnamese Studies.