Paper Wrights, LLC has announced the release of Orbis Pictus: World Affairs in the Visual Digital Era, a pioneering videobook authored by Dr. Vendulka Kubálková, Professor of International Studies. Available in paperback, hardback, and ebook, the publication marks a landmark shift in how International Relations (IR) is taught and consumed. By pairing a concise print companion with 135 professionally produced animated videos, totaling more than 22 hours of instructional content — Dr. Kubálková presents what may be the first videobook of its kind in the IR field, purpose-built for students and educators navigating today's digital-first learning environment.
Spanning 15 thematic groups, the videobook's content is organized into two broad tracks. Groups I through XIV, designated IR PLUS+, extend far beyond standard IR curricula to encompass philosophy, history, civilizations, religions, globalization, Marxist legacy, modernity, and epistemology — subjects the author argues are essential to genuine global literacy yet routinely absent from conventional coursework. Group XV delivers the 41-video core of the International Relations discipline itself, covering realism, the English School, neorealism-neoliberalism debates, and political science critiques. Each video runs between 10 and 20 minutes, features thematically matched musical backgrounds, and is accompanied by a single multiple-choice quiz for classroom assessment. The entire series is accessible online and can be assigned flexibly as weekly homework, with class time reserved for the active debate and discussion the format is designed to spark.
"Playing with videos for almost ten years began as my folly," Dr. Kubálková writes in the book's introduction. Inspired by Bennington College president Dr. Liz Coleman's 2009 TED Talk challenging academics to act — not merely observe — educational decline, Dr. Kubálková spent nearly a decade creating every video herself, working without a studio and well outside her formal training as an IR scholar and Prague Conservatoire graduate. Cognitive science literature informed her conviction that digital-age students process visual information differently from prior generations and deserve teaching methods that meet them where they are. The title itself carries personal weight: it is drawn from the 1658 illustrated textbook Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Czech polymath Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius), introduced to her in childhood by her grandfather, Professor Josef Kubálek — a celebrated Czech pedagogue whose 150th birthday the work honors.


About Author
Dr. Vendulka Kubálková is a Professor of International Studies with decades of teaching experience across the United States, Australia, and Europe, including multiple courses at Czech universities delivered in English to EU students. A political exile who left Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, she earned recognition in the field through her scholarship on constructivism, language in IR, and global international relations — work that drew early endorsement from Cornell University Professor Peter Katzenstein, who incorporated her videos into his classes and described the collection as "an extraordinary body of work." Dr. Kubálková holds a graduate degree from the Prague Conservatoire and has published widely, including the 2026 autobiographical textbook My Path to Global International Relations (Global Animated Inc.). She developed the IR+ video series in collaboration with Steve Jones, President of Domainate Inc., who designed the accompanying website and access platform.