Candace Perkins Bowen is an associate professor at Kent State University. She launched this site in August 2013 while helping to launch a partnership with her KSU’s College of Communication and Information and the Anglo-American University in the Czech Republic. Funded by the Prague Freedom Foundation, the project allowed two professors and 10 students from Kent State to go abroad in 2013 and 10 students and two professors to visit her Ohio campus in January 2014.

In last August 2015, she again headed to Prague, this time as part of her sabbatical, with plans to teach at Anglo-American University there. Thus the second “chapter” of this blog is about that two-month experience of living and working in the city.

Her first Prague adventure was 1990 by bicycle, exploring then Czechoslovakia less than six months after the Velvet Revolution opened the country to outsiders and removed the Communist Party from power. She followed some of the changes as the Velvet Divorce separated the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, and she visited twice in the mid-’90s and again in 1998 to teach “fact-based” American journalism to Czech and Slovak teens for the Open Society/Soros Foundation.