Department of British and American Studies at the - Univerzita ...

A Life Devoted to British and American Studies
Marián Gazdík
Comenius University, Bratislava
Professor Jozef Olexa, one of the founding personalities of British and American
studies in Slovakia after World War II and a distinguished scholar, recently celebrated his
80th birthday. On this occasion the Department of British and American Studies at the Faculty
of Arts of Comenius University would like to honour him by dedicating to him this volume of
studies by Slovak and foreign Anglicists.
Jozef Olexa was born on 1 November 1929 in the village of Spińské Bystré. He
studied at three different high schools in Poprad in the years 1943–51, including a business
school and a business academy. Then between the years 1951–56 he continued in his studies
at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava, specializing in English and
Russian. Within that time for one term he also studied at the Faculty of Arts at Charles
University in Prague. After graduation he worked as editor at the Tatran Publishing House (at
that time still called Slovenské vydavateľstvo krásnej literatúry – Slovak Publishing House of
Belles Lettres). In 1960 he married Irena Malovcová and they have two children, a daughter,
Eva, born in 1961, and a son, Peter, born in 1966. In 1962 he left the publishing house and
applied for doctoral studies at the Institute of Slovak Literature at the Slovak Academy of
Sciences in Bratislava. At the end of his stay there he successfully defended his doctoral
thesis entitled The Novel as a Chronicle of Contemporary Life – the Contemporary English
Novel.
In 1968 he left the Academy and decided for a pedagogical career. He started to
lecture and teach at the Department of British and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts of
Comenius University in Bratislava where he was to stay for almost three further decades. At
this institution he educated several generations of Slovak Anglicists and Americanists, either
teachers and translators or editors and other people working in various spheres of our cultural
life. According to data from the early 1990s, he was the supervisor of the diploma theses of
nearly 100 students and of around 15 students participating in student scholarly research
competitions, not to speak of tutoring numerous post-graduate students working on their
doctoral theses. Over the course of three decades, for several terms he served as the head of
the Department of British and American Studies. In 1980 he defended his habilitation thesis
on the theme Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights. An Interpretation of the Early Victorian
Slovak Studies in English, Vol. 3, 2011 – Identity in Intercultural Communication
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