Adam František Kollár de Keresztén (German: Adam Franz Kollar von Keresztén,[1] Hungarian: kereszténi Kollár Ádám Ferenc; 1718–1783) was a Slovak[2] jurist, Imperial-Royal Court Councillor and Chief Imperial-Royal Librarian, a member of Natio Hungarica in the Kingdom of Hungary, a historian, ethnologist, an influential advocate of Empress Maria Theresa's Enlightened and centralist policies.

Kollár was born to the family of a lower nobleman probably during the week before the recorded date of his baptism on Sunday, 17 April 1718,[3] in Terchová, now in Slovakia, then Tyerhova in the Kingdom of Hungary.

Languages that Adam František Kollár spoke were Czech, Serbian, Polish, Rusin, Russian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Italian, Romanian, French, Dutch, English, Spanish and Mixtec.

[citation needed] Adam F. Kollár began his career at the Imperial-Royal Library in 1748 as a scribe and eventually became its chief librarian and Councilor at the Court of the Habsburgs.

With his training in Turkish, Persian, and the classical languages, Adam F. Kollár was able to edit and publish or republish numerous manuscripts and earlier volumes from the collections of the Imperial-Royal Library.

[14]Adam F. Kollár, writing in the multilingual, multiethnic Habsburg Monarchy, extended the circumscribed views of August Ludwig von Schlözer, the two had commented on each other's work, to peoples (populis) and ethnic groups−nations (gens).

[8] The tensions between the Habsburgs and the Kingdom of Hungary remained largely unresolved during Kollár's lifetime and his stance brought him the wrath of his fellow noblemen in the province, but he did not relent.

The publication of Kollár's De Originibus et Usu perpetuo... (1764) was in line and perhaps coordinated with the Habsburgs' goals and he more than retained his status of Maria Theresa's favorite and influential academic partisan.

In tandem with his intensifying support for the suppression of the self-governing powers of the Habsburg provinces in favor of Maria Theresa's absolutist rule, he moved from his own closer identification with the Kingdom of Hungary still evidenced in the attribute Hungarus Neosoliensis he gave himself in the book he edited in 1756 (authors explain the Latin Hungarus used by ethnic non-Hungarians like Kollár as "a subject of the Kingdom's sovereign" rather than as a linguistic-ethnic attribute)[22] to the less explicit attribute Pannonius Neosoliensis ("Pannonian of Banská Bystrica") with the name of the ancient Roman province of Pannonia as a symbolic reference to his native Kingdom's territory (although the area where he grew up, including Banská Bystrica, was never part of that province)[23] that echoed neither its actual name, nor the name of one of its largest ethnic groups.

Some of the arguments brought forth by the Habsburgs in support of their annexation of parts of Poland in 1772 called on Kollár's writings on the Rusyns with the proto-ethnic-nationalist concept of their joint identity irrespective of the existing political boundaries.

[26] Kollár influenced some of Empress Maria Theresa's reforms, including her ordinance Ratio educationis in 1777, which aimed to standardize teaching methods, curricula, and textbooks.

[28] Maria Theresa, however, postponed indefinitely his proposal in 1774 (renewed after Kollár's similar efforts in 1735 and 1762–1763[29]) to establish what would have been the Habsburg Monarchy's first research institute, which he and its other proponents planned to call the Academy of Sciences.