Research Area 1 & 3: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies & Objects, Traces, Mapping

Contact: alessandro.testa@fsv.cuni.cz

Dr. Alessandro Testa is Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague, where since 2020 he has also led the ERC CZ “ReEnchEu” research project. Prior to this, he was Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Teacher at the University of Vienna (2015–2019).
Trained in history, ethnology, and religious studies at the Universities of Florence, Rome, Paris, and Messina, he received his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2013. He has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic fieldworks in Italy (2010-2012), Czech Republic (2013–2014; 2020-ongoing), and Catalonia (Spain) (2016–2020). In the past decade he has been affiliated for long terms with the Universities of Tallinn, Pardubice, Vienna, and Prague, and has also been a visiting scholar in Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Iceland.
His main research fields are Social and Historical Anthropology and Religious Studies, with a focus on the Ethnology and Cultural History of Europe, Ritual Studies, Comparative Religion, and Cultural Heritage Studies. His research interests encompass topics ranging from public rituality to secularisation, from longue-durée cultural continuities to social transformations, from popular cultures to vernacular forms of religiosity, from mythologies to esotericism, from cultural heritage-making to identity formation and nationalism in Europe, and from theories and methods in social and historical sciences to epistemology. These topics have been approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion and explored theoretically and empirically, either comparatively (at the pan-European or global level) or with a special attention to Central-Eastern and Mediterranean Europe.
His research outputs include four authored books, four edited volumes, some 60 peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in volumes, several dozen other pieces of writing (reviews, reports, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.), and more than 120 talks and conference presentations in 20 countries. For years he has been teaching courses in Historical Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Anthropology of Cultural Heritage, and Ethnographic Methods.
After having successfully completed several individual projects for prestigious research schemes (Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship, Marie Curie / OPVVV), he is currently (2020–2022) Principal Investigator for the ERC CZ project “ReEnchEu – The Re-Enchantment of Central-Eastern Europe”, for which he manages a team of five scholars from four different countries.
His long international experience has led him to become a polyglot – he can write and speak seven languages and has a good understanding or a passive knowledge of another half a dozen.
Apart from his (multi)disciplinary expertise in social and historical sciences, he has a strong interest in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive sciences, and biology, but his true loves remain literature, music, and the arts.

Publications and presentations can be retrieved here.