Jan holds a Master’s degree in German and Czech from Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic) and a PhD in German Medieval and Slavic Studies from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany). He focuses mainly on German, Czech, and Yiddish medieval and early modern literatures and on the intercultural relations in medieval and early modern Central Europe. He has published a comparative monograph on sixteenth-century German and Czech prose novels, a number of essays on medieval and early modern translation, several book chapters on the role of the printing press in late medieval and early modern literature, and an essay on pragmatic aspects of late medieval vernacular hagiography. He is a co-author of a comparative edition of the popular late medieval heroic epic ‘Laurin’ in its German, Czech, Danish, and Faroese adaptations and is currently finishing an extended essay on the Yiddish reception of German medieval courtly poetry. His second book project has the working title ‘Narrative Media of Salvation’. It analyzes the strategies of medieval vernacular narratives, especially legends, that aimed to bestow salvation on their recipients and explores the role narration played in the context of medieval religious practices.