Jan joined NUS in 2003 and is currently associate professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies. Jan is an expert on Southeast Asian arts, in particular Javanese shadow puppet theatre and Javanese and Balinese music. He is the founding director of the NUS Singa Nglaras Gamelan Ensemble. Jan has written about the interaction between Indonesian traditional performing arts and modern media such as television and the internet.

More recently, he also writes about travel and travel writings, with particular focus on Czechs who travelled to Southeast Asia during the colonial period. In teaching, he tries to encourage students to enjoy and value learning, thinking, and living as much as he does, to find their own voice and rhythm in this rushing world, to be wary of loud authoritative voices and values, and to take their learning experience out of the conventional classroom: his courses involve fieldtrip to SE Asian countries, playing music, seafaring, fiction writing, and work with visual media.

Jan grew up in Czechoslovakia and studied at the University of Michigan and Cornell University. He is currently the resident fellow of Noctua House at RC4.