I am Markéta Jakešová, a PhD graduate in philosophy from Charles University in Prague and Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, with a master’s degree in religious studies and comparative literature from Charles University. My academic work centers on phenomenology, Actor-Network Theory, anthropology, Kantian aesthetics, film studies, and feminist and decolonial philosophy, with a particular focus on embodied subjectivity.
My studies have taken me to Prague, Vienna, Toulouse, Cologne, and Edmonton, where I eventually settled in 2021. I translated three books from French to Czech.
Outside academia, I contribute to Czech journals (Deník Referendum and Tvar) on political and cultural issues and volunteer as a copy editor for Moje tělo je moje (My Body Is Mine), a non-profit organization fighting body-shaming. My interests include photography, cinema, reading, running, resistance training, fiction writing, blogging (Blogger and Tumblr), singing, playing the guitar, psychedelics, non-monogamy, and food.
I have tried to learn an absurd number of languages—the most obscure being Thai—but I’m properly fluent only in Czech and English. Additionally, I can read Slovak, French, German, and (partially) Italian. These days, I’m practicing HTML and CSS here.
Feel free to connect with me to talk research, review films or books, or share thoughts on the intersections of technology, culture, and the human experience.
For a more detailed overview of my academic background, see my full academic CV and the pdf version for print.
After graduating high school, I wanted to study everything. And I really do mean everything: literature, civil engineering, theoretical physics, political science… In the country where I grew up, humanities are undervalued just like everywhere else — but paradoxically, getting into a humanities program is often harder than entering fields like engineering or science. So when I passed all the entrance exams, I enrolled in a five-year master's program in the humanities — partly out of pride, and partly because theoretical physics, while tempting, would have been a nightmare for both me and anyone around me. Getting into the physics program might have been easier, but surviving it would have been another story (probably almost as hard as finding a job with humanities degrees a decade later).
I chose comparative literature and religious studies. Although religious studies was my second choice — added only because literature couldn’t be studied on its own — I eventually found it, and the intellectual community around it, even more stimulating. It ended up inspiring me to pursue a PhD in philosophy. I studied officially in two countries and three languages, and factually across four countries and four languages (not counting all the “hobby” languages I was studying on the side), which meant navigating endless bureaucracy. My attention remained wildly dispersed across subfields — something reflected in the range of topics I’ve published on, presented on, and … talked about a lot.
When no one really believed it would ever happen, I finally finished my PhD: after the COVID-19 pandemic, amid various personal crises, and while (eventually successfully) trying to relocate to Canada. Together, my degrees have taught me to think critically and with focus (philosophy), beyond Western hegemonic frameworks (religious studies), and with creativity and nuance (comparative literature). For a more detailed overview of my academic background, see my full academic CV.
I still consider myself a beginning academic. But when I was a truly beginning academic — right after high school — I was afraid to write, like most people. And for good reason. My writing was terrible, as all my professors knew and as every friend who ever gave me a writing “job” (mostly unpaid) quickly discovered. But just like in that story where one group was asked to make the most beautiful pot possible, and the other to simply make as many pots as they could, and the first group ended up empty-handed, while the second, among many crappy pots, also produced a few beautiful ones, the Czech literary scene had enough patience to let me be in the second group. I learned to write — fast, decently, and on almost any topic — as long as it wasn’t academic. After a few rather bad book reviews, I started covering decolonial topics, at first with help from Milan Kroulík. When he eventually faded from my life, I continued on my own, writing about decolonialism, feminism, science studies, and more recently, film. Beyond full-length articles, I also keep a concise film diary on Letterboxd. My most amusing “expertise” these days is Canadian politics, so apart from covering the issue of Indigenous people, I’ve written two articles on recent changes in the Canadian political scene.
My favorite writing genre is blogging, which I started on two platforms and eventually hope to migrate here. The Tumblr blog covers my experience as an immigrant/settler in Canada, while the Blogger site is mostly about relationships and other general topics. About a year ago, I began working on a personal text with Behdad Esfahbod, which — with his support — will hopefully develop into a novel.
I mostly live, work, write, and think in English. I exclusively feel and love in English. Even having sex in Czech feels weird. And yet, I find myself in the familiar position of many dislocated people: no longer fluent in my mother tongue, but never fully fluent in my second language either. My English proficiency is, of course, above the average native speaker’s — but it’s also supposed to be my job. I can’t, you know, build houses or write code. In that sense, I’m always grieving the linguistic brilliance I’ll never reach.
I once knew someone fluent in four languages, able to communicate in two or three more. They used to complain there was no language where they felt “at home.” My parents, who speak only Czech properly and a bit of English (no offense — they had it much harder than me), would say they’d happily trade places with that multilingual person, even if it meant imperfect Czech. But my parents are engineers! They imagined they’d keep their profession and add fluency in five languages on top. And even though my ability to express myself in Czech or English may surpass theirs — again, it’s my job — the feeling of an unmet potential remains. Forever out of reach.
Still, languages are my passion. It started like this: under the (so-called) communist regime, my parents’ generation had limited access to and little motivation for learning foreign languages. They were required to learn Russian; some managed some English or German, mostly useful if they ran away. My parents saw the freedom their children had, and placed somewhat unrealistic expectations on how easily my sister and I would become fluent in English — or maybe other languages, too. It wasn't as easy as that, of course.
I started learning English at five, but I was virtually unable to speak it until I was eighteen. In the meantime, I picked up French, Russian, and Latin. French was a school choice over German; Russian and Latin were just “there,” available. During a five-week stay in Scotland with family friends, the block around speaking English melted — and with it, the one around French (at least the version I knew at the time).
At university, I had to pass several language exams. At first, I took the path of least resistance — perhaps my only strategic decision in those years: I did the exams in English, French, Latin, and later Biblical Hebrew (because I needed another “religious” language). But then I got into Austrian literature and learned German to spend a semester in Vienna. Later, within the religious studies community, I heard that “no one has properly studied religion until they’ve learned Ancient Greek.” And that’s when things spiraled.
I enrolled in a philosophy undergrad I never finished — mostly as a procrastination tactic to avoid writing my master’s thesis. Then I procrastinated from that by learning Ancient Greek. When my sweetheart at the time decided to try Japanese (their own procrastination from Ancient Greek and Sanskrit), I joined them in the course to be supportive. We both ended up procrastinating from Japanese by starting Thai.
Another chapter was learning the basics of languages spoken in countries I planned to visit: Italian, Romanian, more Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Turkish… Later came attempts to learn code: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And then the mother tongues of people I became close to: Portuguese, Persian, Wolof (which I gave up on immediately). I’ve lost track.
What’s left from all this is the occasional translation job and my ability to amuse people at parties by knowing more about the grammar of their own language than they do. Of course, in the end, I only speak English. And Czech — which I no longer really use.
I come from the Czech Republic and now I live in Edmonton (Alberta), Canada. My most favorite people in the world are my sister, her daughter and son, and my partner. I am very close to the Iranian community of Edmonton.
Email: jakesova [dot] marketa [at] gmail [dot] com