All posts by Cefres

CEFRES Team

Josefína Formanová – Research & CV

“Philosophy of Failure: Negativity and Error in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”

contact: josefina.formanova@cefres.cz

Research Area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

My dissertation project draws on the observation that the current global society revolves around the highly valued ideal of success. In addition, we can witness the declining ability to resign into passivity or doubt on the one hand, as well as the increasing tendency to lethargy where action proves vital on the other. In the broader scope of my research, I explore the notion of passivity in action, and claim it to be the foundation for living in meaningful relationships with others and the world. Specifically, I adhere to the idea of reinventing the understanding of activity according to its inherent uncontrollability, which appears to be present in each human act or relation. My research embarks from the most common situation, in which controllability is open for observations: from human failure.  Continue reading Josefína Formanová – Research & CV →

CEFRES Team, Non classé

Valentin Auger – Research & CV

“The Quest for a Lost Meaning: Work and Workers in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia. A Story of Flying Literature”

 Contact: valentin.auger[@]ff.cuni.cz

Research Area : 1

 

My doctoral research focuses on the notion of meaning in the work experienced by workers in socialist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. It is being carried out at the Institute of Economic and Social History (ÚHSD) of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Continue reading Valentin Auger – Research & CV →

CEFRES Team, Non classé

Jan Musil – Research & CV

“Thanatographies and the Modes of Literary Mourning”

Contact : me@janmusil.net 

Research Area 2 

In my research at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University, I am looking at autobiographical narratives concerned with the death of a close person and mourning, which I call thanatographies. 

In the contexts of claims that death had been made into a taboo during the 20th century (Ariès, Becker, Ohler, Jankélévitch, etc.), I understand thanatographies, emerging mainly in the second half of the period, as counter-narratives that treat death in its different forms, such as death of the other, grief, fear of own death, processes of dying, hospitalization, suicide, etc. in a sensitive and complex manner. If the norm is death that is on the one hand inexpressible or radically Other, or, on the other hand, aesthesized, objectified and medicalized, then the transgression is death, dying and grief as a subjective experience, communicated through writing, which is aware of its own performative nature (de Man) and seeks a sense of agency in the grieving process (Blumenberg). I am mainly interested in how mourning is staged using literary means, and I offer alternatives to the widespread Freudian reading of grief writing (not just thanatographies, but elegies and other commemorative genres, too) as work of mourning.  Continue reading Jan Musil – Research & CV →

Calls for Papers

CFP – The “Voice from Below”. Workshop EHESS–CEFRES

The “Voice from Below” – In the Face of Repression and Arbitrary State Violence

This PhD Students Workshop is organized within the cooperation agreement signed by EHESS, CEFRES, Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Date: 22 November, 2024
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1 (and online)
Deadline for application submissions: 30 September, 2024
Deadline for paper submissions: 8 November, 2024
Language of the workshop: English

When we talk about the forms of resistance and protest that developed in the face of the authoritarian system we are primarily concerned with demonstrations that were quickly and brutally interrupted, acts of desperation such as immolation by fire, or the development of clandestine publications, copied and passed from hand to hand. This is the case for example in the USSR and the countries under its domination, but also in any other authoritarian state, While much research today has renewed the study of these actions, particularly what is referred to as dissidence, there remain many more individual forms of action which, without being an explicit confrontation with the authorities, can be likened to protests, profound questioning of the foundations of the system, attempts to extricate oneself from a repressive process felt to be unjust or expressing unacceptable forms of political violence.

Continue reading CFP – The “Voice from Below”. Workshop EHESS–CEFRES →

CEFRES Team

Natalia Marakhovska Research & CV

Embracing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) through Art
in Culturally Responsive Teaching

Research  Area 2: Norms and Transgressions

Natalia Marakhovska, an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance and Germanic Philology at Mariupol State University, relocated to Kyiv, Ukraine, joins CEFRES for 2024. She is a team member of the Erasmus+ project BELONG (Better Education through Long-term Investment into Inclusiveness and Student and Staff Wellbeing) at the Competence Development Centre of Masaryk University, Brno.

Continue reading Natalia Marakhovska Research & CV →

Non classé

Thomas Chopard – Research & CV

Visual Representations, Memorials and Commemorations of the Second World War in Central Europe

Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces

Contact: thomas.chopard[@]ehess.fr

Thomas Chopard is a historian and assistant professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, at the Centre of Historical Research (EHESS/CRH). His research focuses on the history of anti-Jewish persecution and Jewish migration in Central and Eastern Europe. His early work focused on the pogroms and anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine during the revolutionary period, before contributing to the ERC project Lubartworld retracing the trajectories of the Jews of the Polish town of Lubartów. His current research is at the intersection of the study of forced displacement suffered by Jews during the Second World War and the history of Stalinist repression.