The Institute of Romance Studies has a specialization in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese languages and literatures, with special emphasis on studying each of these cultures in all their different forms as they exist in Europe as well as in the Americas. Far from being restricted to Romance cultures, our research draws on a comparatist approach to the entire Euro-American culture, necessitating interdisciplinary cooperation with other institutes at the Faculty of Arts. In addition to conducting team projects, the Institute understands the inevitability of individual research in the humanities–disciplines involving less team work than sciences–and, to that end, supports publication of monographs and pursuit of individual research grants. The academic staff also place great emphasis on research application, publishing theoretically based teaching materials as well as introducing foreign literatures, languages and cultures into the Czech culture, by publishing articles in journals. Another important aspect of our academic work is producing translations with comments, in a variety of fields including academic works and non-fiction.