Adam František Kollár

Adam František Kollár (1718–1783) was a Slovak scholar and a central intellectual of Maria Theresa's enlightened reforms. Educated by the Jesuits at Trnava and Vienna, he left the order afterwards. In 1748 he joined the Imperial Court Library and began teaching classical Greek, becoming chief librarian in 1774.

A linguist at home in more than twenty languages, he wrote works of history and law that underpinned the empress's centralizing policy; his arguments in 1772 for her apostolic rights over Hungary helped justify the Habsburg acquisition of Galicia. In 1783 he gave the first definition of the discipline he named ethnology.