The Institutionalization of Geography at the Comenius University in Bratislava in 1922 – 1926.
The Institutionalization of Geography at the Comenius University in Bratislava in 1922 – 1926.

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the process of institutionalization of geography at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. We start from the understanding of the institutionalization of the academic discipline as a process of establishing and definitively occupying the chair by a full professor and establishing the seminar as the basic institutional unit of the faculty. We discuss the broader context of the underlying factors of the institutionalization of geography at universities in Central Europe. We will then highlight the initial steps in the institutionalization of geography at the Comenius university in Bratislava. Based on detailed research in the archives of Comenius University, we will show that the process of institutionalization of geography was spread over a period of five years from January 1922 to December 1926. Since there were no specialists in this field in Slovakia, the establishment and development of geography was possible only thanks to the help of Czech professors from Charles University in Prague. A new finding is that the ethnographer Karel Chotek was the main initiator and actor of the process of institutionalization of geography, which disrupts the hitherto traditional narrative about the key role of Jiří Viktor Daneš in this process. The Faculty of Arts made efforts to stabilize the chair of geography and proposed that F. Štůla could be appointed associate professor of general geography. This proposal was accepted in December 1926, which solved the issue of occupying the chair. In June 1926, the statutes of the Geographical Seminar and the Pro-Seminar were also approved by the Ministry of Education and National Enlightenment, so that the process of institutionalization of geography at Comenius University in Bratislava can be considered complete.

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