Multilingualism Spotlight: Dr. Kamila Kinyon-Kuchař

Dr. Kamila Kinyon-Kuchař’s story begins in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1968, a year marked by political upheaval and personal transformation. At just three years old, she fled with her family to the United States during the Soviet invasion, carrying with her the sounds and rhythms of Czech, her first language. Today, as a DU professor in the University Writing Program, Dr. Kinyon-Kuchař’s multilingual journey has become a cornerstone of her identity, her scholarship, and her advocacy for linguistic justice.

Growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, Dr. Kinyon-Kuchař navigated the complexities of living between two languages. At home, her parents insisted on speaking Czech, while at school, she quickly adapted to English. This duality led to moments of creative and often humorous code-meshing. “When I was a child, I have some really funny examples of that when I was living in Princeton,” she recalls. One memorable example stands out. After stepping into a puddle, she told her parents, “Zvetila jsem si nohy” a hybrid of the English “wet.” “Czech doesn't have a ‘w,’ so I changed it to a ‘v’. And then I put the Czech prefix, a ‘z,’ as well as the Czech suffix, to say zvetila. And in Czech this word means ‘to recover’ like when you're recovering from an illness or something like that,” she says. “So, it sounded really funny in Czech.”

These childhood experiences were not always seamless. Czech’s phonetic spelling led her to write cat with a “k,” while English’s “th” sounds tripped her up. “I would say ‘fink’ instead of ‘think’,” she shares. Sent to a speech therapist, she resisted: “And I was just really angry because I didn’t want people to think there was something wrong with my pronunciation… In fact, they took me out, because I just wouldn’t do it, and I was so upset about it.” These struggles, however, taught her early on that language is fluid, messy, and deeply personal.

Dr. Kinyon-Kuchař’s academic career became a natural extension of her bilingual upbringing. After earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies at the University of Chicago, she explored the nuances of translation in her article about Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), where the word ‘robot’ was first coined. Her analysis in “Phonomenology of Robots: Confrontations with Death in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.” revealed how English translations flattened philosophical subtleties, which were important to the play’s underlying Hegelian and Kantian frameworks. For instance, “words that just didn't really translate well into English were ‘pán’ and ‘panovat.’” “‘Pán’ can be translated as ‘lord’ or ‘master,’ as in the master-slave dialectic, but also as ‘Lord’ as in God,” she explains. “So, what people really appreciated about that publication was me dealing with the different translations and the linguistic subtleties.”

This insight fuels her teaching. In first-year composition classes, she encourages students to interview participants in their native languages. “I really encourage them, if they're interviewing someone whose native language is not English, to use that language in the interview and then to include their own translation as well as the original if there's a key phrase that they've used in that.” Many of her students have done qualitative research in multiple languages and have presented this to different publics in oral histories, journalistic articles, or multimodal pieces. For instance, one student successfully blended languages through subtitles and voiceover in a video tracing his grandparents’ journey as they moved from Bhutan to a refugee camp in Nepal to their present home in the U.S. “I think it’s really important to be able to work with more than one language,” Dr. Kinyon-Kuchař emphasizes.

For Dr. Kinyon-Kuchař, multilingualism is not just an academic tool; it is a form of advocacy and heritage. She critiques the “deficit model with which multilingualism has been viewed for so long.”  In her 2024 chapter for Interrogating Race and Racism in Postsecondary Language Classrooms, she argues for an “asset-based model,” where multilingualism is celebrated as a strength and an advantage. 

She applauds DU’s efforts to support its multilingual and multicultural communities through courses such as English for Academic Purposes and Spanish for Heritage Speakers as well as through resources like the Africa Center, DU Ethnography Lab, or First@DU. However, she urges further progress to best support a greater variety of linguistic backgrounds. “Let's say I came to DU as a student and spoke Czech and didn't speak very much English at all.  I would maybe have to take Spanish as a requirement or Mandarin or something else that the university offers.” This situation, she argues, highlights the need for change: “I think that that's something that the university actually could work more on is to not have those types of requirements and to let people test out of a language requirement through whatever their native language is.” Her vision is clear. Universities must move beyond frameworks that privilege some languages over others to embrace the translingual fluency of global citizens.

Dr. Kinyon-Kuchař’s advice to multilingual students and faculty is rooted in pride and resilience. Reflecting on her own journey, she notes how stress still brings out a faint Czech accent in her English. For her, language is more than communication. It is a tether to identity. “I know it's been an important part of my heritage to be able to speak Czech and stay connected to Czech culture,” she says. To her, multilingualism is more than just words. “I encourage people who are multilingual to really value their multilingualism and to use all of their linguistic resources.”