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CEFRES Team, Non classé

Adam M. Aksnowicz – Research & CV

“Towards What Homeland?
(Trans)National Armies in Exile and Renegotiations of Polish and Czechoslovak National Narratives, 1938-48“

Contact: aksnowicz_adam@phd.ceu.edu

Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements,” and Descrepancies: People, Knowledge, and Practices

Adam M. Aksnowicz is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History, Central European University in Vienna, Austria. His dissertation, Towards What Homeland? (Trans)National Armies in Exile and Renegotiations of Polish and Czechoslovak National Narratives, 1938-48, under the supervision of Constantine Iordachi and Charles Shaw, is being developed in cooperation with CEFRES Research Area 1.

My dissertation reassesses the historical phenomenon of national armed forces in exile during the Second World War by analyzing military nation-building projects of Polish armies in exile and the Czechoslovak resistance abroad from transnational, comparative, and global perspectives. Building from my previous MA thesis entitled, “Without Lwów and Wilno There is No Poland” The Cause of Kresy in Exiled Polish Army Press and Propaganda in Italy, 1944-1946, my current project explores conceptual-historical complexities and persistent legacies of national-military exile(s) in renegotiations of nation, state, and homeland between the downfall of the young post-Versailles republics and the radical post-war reconstruction of East Central Europe. By contextualizing Polish and Czechoslovak military exile within transnational, global, and imperial-colonial entanglements of Europe’s early twentieth-century’ “age of catastrophe” (Doumanis 2016), I aim to move beyond dominant national-patriotic approaches and binary Cold War frameworks to contribute to new critical scholarship of exiled state apparatuses during WWII and engage with interdisciplinary discussions surrounding topics like exile, civil-military relations, transnationalities of nation-building, and collective narrative (re)construction.

As a researcher with a background in both sociology and history, my research to date has primarily focused on historical and collective memory studies of interwar, wartime, and early Cold War Poland/Polish diaspora in global contexts. However, during my time in Prague with CEFRES, I look forward to further developing the comparative Czechoslovak dimension of my dissertation by visiting the Czech state archives as well as discussing other analogous cases of exile/displacement with like-minded colleagues to strengthen the project’s overall conceptual framework.

Education

  • 2022 – current: PhD Candidate, Comparative History at Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
  • 2019-2020: MA, Comparative History at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
  • 2016-2018: MA, Sociology – Intercultural Mediation at University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland. Winner of the Dean’s Award for Best MA Thesis at UWr Faculty of Social Sciences (2018).
  • 2012-2014: BA, History at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Teaching Experience

  • 2023/2024 Fall: Teaching assistant in Comparative, Transnational and Global Histories: Rethinking Geographical and Temporal Scales, under the instruction of Balázs Trencsényi. Department of Comparative History at Central European University, Vienna, AT.

Conferences & Summer Schools

  • Presenter – (Non)Polish Army in Exile? Researching the Red Army’s Kościuszko Division Between History and Contested Memory. VIII Public History Summer School. The Historical Institute of the University of Wrocław, Poland (HI UWr), Wrocław, PL, 9-13 June 2025.
  • Presenter – Antisemitism, Propaganda, and Polish Armies in Exile during WWII. ComFas Summer School on Fascism, Antisemitism and the Holocaust: Theory, Methodology, and Case Studies. International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (ComFas), Rijeka, HR, 9-14 July 2023.
  • Presenter – Echoes of Wartime Trauma: Children of Polish Deportees Living in the West after WWII. XIX International Student Conference “Communication and Culture” at University of Wrocław, PL, 23-24 May 2018.
  • Presenter – The Holy Constitution? Sacred Roles of Historic Legal Text in Democratic Nation-States. IV International Conference “Law-Religion-Politics.” SKN Doctrines of Politics and Law at the University of Wrocław, PL, 13-14 April 2018.
  • Panel Moderator – Postwar Generations Remember (Concluding Panel). Kresy Siberia Foundation “Generations Remember” Conference at The History Meeting House, Warsaw, PL, 15-17 September 2017.
  • Presenter – Orange Dwarves and Pepe the Frog: A Comparison of Absurdity as Political Tactic by Poland’s Historic Orange Alternative and the Contemporary American Alt-Right. XVIII Annual International Student Conference “Communication and Culture” at the University of Wrocław, PL, 25-26 May 2017.

Publications and Projects

  • Nowy rozdział starej Res Publica Nowa, 4 July 2022.
  • A New Approach to CEE Communism Studies. Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989. Visegrad Insight, 5 October 2021.
  • Uses and Abuses of Political Appeals to ‘Civilization’: Kathryn Ciancia’s Book on Interwar Borderland in Poland. Visegrad Insight, 31 March 2021.
  • A Century of Demagogues in Europe: Ivan T. Berend’s Portraits of Populists between Past and Present. Visegrad Insight, 7 January 2021.
  • Co-Editor of The Polish Museum of America Visitor Brochure, Chicago, USA. Grant Project Funded by the Republic of Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, 2015.
  • Co-Creator of The Polish Museum of America’s Online Collections Database, Chicago, USA. Grant Project Funded by the Republic of Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, 2014. URL: https://polishmuseum.pastperfectonline.com/
CEFRES Team

Andrej Vašíček – Recherche & CV

“Cultural and Historical Memory of the Landscape in Hungary in the 18th Century”

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

Introduction

This dissertation examines the cultural and historical memory embedded in the rural and semi-rural landscapes of 18th-century Hungary. It explores how local communities perceived, shaped, and remembered their surroundings, focusing on the material traces, spatial practices, and symbolic representations that connected people to the land over time.

Research Questions

  • How was the landscape remembered and represented in legal, religious, and social contexts during the 18th century?
  • What material or symbolic traces of past uses and meanings can be identified in the landscape (e.g. crosses, boundary markers, hydrological structures, routes)?
  • How did natural features (rivers, forests, hills) become part of collective memory or identity?
  • In what ways did the transformation of the landscape—through cultivation, regulation, or settlement—affect the cultural memory of its inhabitants?

Methodology

The research combines approaches from environmental history, historical anthropology, and critical cartography. It draws on a variety of historical sources:

  • Urbaria and conscriptions, reflecting the socio-economic use of land.
  • Historical maps and cadastral plans, to track spatial organization and memory.
  • Parish records, inscriptions, and religious monuments, to trace symbolic landscape elements.
  • Narrative sources (such as local chronicles) for mental and lived geographies.

The project uses microhistorical case studies from specific regions of historical Upper Hungary to reconstruct the interaction between people and landscape.

Empirical Foundation:

The primary empirical basis includes:

  • Archival material from the Hungarian National Archives and Slovak regional archives.
  • 18th-century maps from military and ecclesiastical collections.
  • Fieldwork involving the documentation of surviving landscape features (e.g. stone crosses, remnants of old field systems, flood regulation structures).

Contribution to CEFRES Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping

The dissertation contributes to the understanding of landscape as a palimpsest of objects and traces—a space marked by layers of past meanings, uses, and representations. It proposes that the memory of place is not only transmitted through texts or rituals but also inscribed into the terrain through spatial practices and preserved physical remnants. By investigating how people inhabited and interpreted their environment, this research offers a historical perspective on the production of space, connecting tangible objects with intangible memory. It also engages in mapping these traces, both literally (through GIS) and conceptually, as a way to understand how landscapes become historical and cultural archives.

Calls for Applications, France > Visegrad, Visegrad > France

CFA | Oszkár Sárkány Fellowship 2025/2026

Fellowship for CNRS Humanities & Social Sciences & IAS CEU Budapest Fellows

Initiated in 2025, the Oszkár Sárkány fellowship commemorates a Hungarian Bohemist (1912–1943), working for a new inclusive and transnational perspective on cultural history with strong ties to French developments in humanities and social sciences, who died tragically young during World War II in a punishment battalion where he was sent because of his oppositional stance to the Horthy regime.

Central European University Institute for Advances Studies (CEU IAS) & Parisian Institut d’études avancées (Paris IEA) in partnership with the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) offer mobility grants to Budapest (for IEA fellows) and Paris (for CEU IAS fellows) starting from the academic year 2025/2026.

SCHEDULES

For IAS CEU fellows → Paris:

  • July 14, 2025: Opening of the call
  • September 15, 2025, 23:59 CET: Deadline for submissions
  • September 30, 2025: Publication of the results
  • Duration: 1 month in Paris
  • Suggested period of mobility: 2025/2026 academic year, preferably in Spring 2026

For CNRS fellows → IAS CEU Budapest: Continue reading CFA | Oszkár Sárkány Fellowship 2025/2026 →

Calls for Applications, Mobility

CFA | Research Grants in Balkan Studies 2025–2026

Research grants for French-speaking doctoral students (6 months)

Le ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères, le réseau des UMIFRE et le réseau des Écoles françaises à l’étranger (EFE – MESR) soutiennent la jeune recherche en études balkaniques en proposant des bourses de terrain d’une durée de six mois à destination de doctorant/es et jeunes docteur/es poursuivant des recherches dans ce domaine. Les boursiers et boursières seront accueilli/es dans un ou plusieurs des centres membres du réseau des UMIFRE ou EFE partenaires du programme (Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes d’Istanbul (IFEA), École française d’Athènes (EFA), Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales de Prague (CEFRES), École française de Rome (EFR). Continue reading CFA | Research Grants in Balkan Studies 2025–2026 →

CEFRES Actions for Ukraine, Join us, Non classé

UMIFRE fellowships for Ukrainian researchers | Results

      1. ANKHYM, Oleksii (Ivan Franko State University)
        Between Languages and Cultures: on Contemporary German-language literature by authors of Ukrainian origin
      2. KARABIN, Tetiana (Uzhhorod State University)
        Anti-Corruption Potential of Ukraine’s New Law on Administrative Procedure
      3. NAMESTIUK, Svitlana (Medical University Chernivtsi )
        Conceptualisation littéraire de la guerre et réception française du mythe du Donbass. Vers une poétique de la mémoire dans la littérature ukrainienne contemporaine
      4. PALIICHUK, Elina (Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University)
        The development of the concept of the translation ecosystem in Ukraine for accession to the EU
      5. YANENKO, Anna (Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra and Museums)
        Art and Photo (in) History: Museum of the History of Religion(s) of the Kyiv All-Ukrainian Museum Town in the early 1930s
      6. SHUMYLOVYCH, Bohdan (Lviv Centre for Urban History)
        “Quiet Trauma”: Wartime Violence and Mediatized Gaze
      7. BILOKON, Alona (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University)
        Focuses on the intersection of energy transition, international relations, and regional development, with particular attention to the socio-economic and geopolitical dimensions of energy transition and the green economy.
      8. FISUN, Oleksandr (Karazin University Kharkiv)
        Resilience, and Local Governance in Ukraine’s Frontline Regions
      9. MYKHALCHUK, Roman (Rivne State University of Humanities)
        The Holocaust in the general district of “Voly-Podillia”: bystanders, victims, executioners, 1941-1944
      10. SHUMYTSKA, Halyna (Uzhhorod State University)
        Diversity, Identities and Language Integration
      11. KUDRYAVSTEVA, Natalia (State Pedagogical University Kryvyi Rih)
        Building Ukraine’s Multilingual Policy from Below
      12. ROMANYSHYN, Nataliya (Lviv Polytechnic National University)
        Ukrainian National Identity and Memory in Wartime Discourse: Literary Strategies and Symbolic Reconfiguration

WAITING LIST   

        1. Gnatiuk, Mykola (National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)
          Integration of Ukraine into the EU: Social Representations in the Context of War
        2. Razyhraev, Oleh (Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University)
          Daily life in the prisons of interwar Poland (1918–1939)
        3. Stefurak, Olena (University of Tchernivtsi)
          Les traductrices de la diaspora ukrainienne : circulation et réception de la littérature ukrainienne en France (XXe–XXIe siècles)
        4. Chemerys, Hanna (Zaporizhzhia National University)
          Feminist Strategies in Ukrainian Wartime Art as a Soft Resistance
Calls for Papers

CFP | Queer Bookshelves and LGBTQI+ Literatures

Circulation, Anthologisation And Canon Formation In Comparative Perspective

Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2025
Date: May 12-13, 2026
Location: Brussels
Language: English and French
Contact email: clement.dessy@ulb.be

Organizers
Mateusz CHMURSKI, CEFRES/Sorbonne Université
Clément DESSY, FNRS/Université libre de Bruxelles
Ana I. SIMÓN-ALEGRE, Adelphi University, NYC Continue reading CFP | Queer Bookshelves and LGBTQI+ Literatures →