Category Archives: CEFRES Team

CEFRES Team

Domenico Scagliusi – Research & CV

“The court of heirs: memory of the GULAG in contemporary Russian-language literature (2000-2022)”

Research areas 1 and 2: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices & Norms and transgressions

His research focuses on fiction published in the Russian language between 2000 and 2020 which places particular attention on the GULAG and the transmission of its memory in the post-Soviet space. These works, particularly significant at the turn of the 2010s (Jones 2024), form part of the global rise in the study of “post memory” (Hirsch 2012) within a political framework underscored by tensions between Russia and those other states which emerged from the dissolution of the USSR (Koposov 2018), as well as Putin’s increasingly repressive policies regarding his opponents.

His research therefore explores a period in which the memory of the GULAG is politically significant, as important questions are raised about the relationship between the state and its citizens, just as they are about Russia and its neighbours. This body of literature is henceforth considered as an expression of the variety of ideological positions which divide Russian-speaking intellectual debate and which find a major battleground in the history of Soviet repressions. In the absence of judicial sanctions for the violence committed by the Soviet state or of an agreed consensus on how to interpret those events, fiction allows the creation of a symbolic space where the act of storytelling is configured as a way of passing judgement on the past.

His thesis addresses these problems through a study of nine works of fiction published between 2001 and 2019, in which retrospective judgement is brought by a contemporary character to the writing of the novel: “the heir”. The development of this notion – already apparent in the field of memory studies (Jurgenson & Prstojevic 2012; Barjonet 2022; Panico 2024) – constitutes one of the issues in this research. Through the figure of the heir, these texts depict a process of subjective reinvestment in the past, examining both narrative development and the interplay between the discourses of various “memory actors” (Bogumił 2018) at work in the post-Soviet context.

 

Education

 

  • September 2022 – present: PhD student in Slavic studies at Sorbonne University / Eur’ORBEM under the supervision of Hélène Mélat and Luba Jurgenson.
  • 15-19th April 2024: Spring School 4EU+ Pluralities of Memory Spring School: Borderlands of Memory, organised by Charles University, Prague.
  • 11-15th July 2022: Summer School 4EU+ Digital memories: problems, methodologies, theories, organised by the University of Milan
  • 2020–2022: Master’s degree in Russian literature at Sorbonne University

 

Academic Publications (selection)

 

  • « Le cinéma en juge de l’histoire ? Le spectre de l’année 1938 dans le film Le capitaine Volkonogov s’est échappé », Revue des Etudes slaves, vol. XCV, n° 4, 2024, p. 565-580.
  • « Tchapaev devint un zombie, mais il passait encore à la télé. La littérature russe des années 2000 dans les décombres de l’idéologie soviétique », Les Grandes figures historiques dans les lettres et les arts, n° 14, 2025. Online : https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/651?lang=en. 
  • « Zapretnye rukopisi. Arheologija semejnoj pamjati v sovremennoj russkoj literature » [Les manuscrits interdits. Archéologie de la mémoire familiale dans la littérature russe contemporaine], Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, n° 193/3, 2025, pp. 212-227.

 

Presentations (selection)

 

  • « D. Bykov, Z. Prilepin: 20 let opravdanij sovetskogo Terrora » [D. Bykov et Z. Prilepine en miroir : 20 ans de justifications des répressions soviétiques]. International seminar Being a writer under Putin. Inalco, Paris, March 2025.
  • « Echoes of Injustice: Russian-speaking literature coming to terms with the Soviet repressions ». Congrès annuel de l’Association canadienne des slavistes. Montréal, June 2024.
  • « Performing the Duty of Memory: Five Time Travel Narratives of the Great Patriotic War ». International seminar Historical Past and Contemporary Propaganda in the Global Context. Bard College et Smolny Beyond Borders, Berlin, June 2024.

 

Teaching Experience (selection)

 

  • September 2022 – May 2025: Course “Commentaire littéraire”, weekly seminar for second year Russian studies undergraduate students, Sorbonne University
  • September 2022 – May 2023: Course “Auteur, narrateur, personnage”, biweekly seminar for master’s students specialising in literature in the programme “Monde russe”, Sorbonne University

 

Organisation of academic sessions

 

  • April 2023 – present: series of sessions “L’Observatoire du Sensible” (Sorbonne University & University of Lille): series of sessions with contemporary Russian-speaking authors, among whom: Maria Stepanova, Daria Serenko, Galina Rymbu, Sergei Lebedev, Sasha Filipenko.
  • 18-20th June 2025: Conference of Collettivo Giovani Slavisti, University of Naples
  • 4-7th April 2023: Seminar Sexe, sexualité, relations sexuelles dans la science-fiction, 11th international seminar of Stella Incognita. Sorbonne University (UFR d’études slaves, faculté des Lettres) & l’École Polytechnique (Département Langues et Cultures et Chaire arts et sciences); National School of Decorative Arts – PSL and and Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso; Research workshops at Eur’ORBEM (Sorbonne University) and LinX, junior workshop “Passage”; the Institute of Slavic Studies and Cinéma Le André des Arts

 

Other activities and affiliations

 

  • June 2025 – present: Member of the administrative council of the Institute of Slavic Studies
  • September 2024 – present: Co-coordinator (with Sarah Gruszka) of the field “Histoire, mémoire et arts” of the research collective Coruscant, European branch of the Russia Program at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), George Washington University.
  • September 2023 – present: Representative of the Junior Workshop “Passage”, composed of doctoral students from UMR Eur’ORBEM
CEFRES Team

Garance Fromont – Research & CV

“Too loud a freedom: emergence of a Cinematographic New Wave in communist Czechoslovakia (1956-1968)”

CEFRES Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the Cerilac research center (Université Paris Cité), where she is preparing a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Frédérique Berthet. Her research focuses on the conditions that enabled the emergence of a New Wave within the nationalized film industry of 1960s Czechoslovakia. Often regarded as a derivative of the French New Wave that emerged a few years earlier, the specific material, economic, and aesthetic features of the Czechoslovak New Wave remain largely unknown, as do its influences and the dialogues it fostered with the broader landscape of “New Cinemas” that appeared across the world during the same period.

This doctoral project offers an economic, technical, and aesthetic model of this cinematic movement, with a particular focus on its two main hubs: the Barrandov Studios in Prague and the Koliba Studios in Bratislava. Building upon the work of contemporary Czech film historians, the dissertation seeks to demonstrate that this body of inventive films—often seen as visually and even ideologically breaking with the productions of the previous decade—should not be viewed as anomalies in Czechoslovakia’s film history. On the contrary, they are embedded within a consciously adopted national cultural policy. This research adopts a cultural history approach, combining social and political history, production and reception studies, the history of styles and artistic movements, and elements of New Cinema History. It places strong emphasis on archival sources—both institutional and private—that help shed light on these films from the perspective of their creators. Ultimately, the project questions the historical regime of this artistic movement by rethinking and problematizing its periodization.

Publications 
Books 

Cinématérialisms: New materialistic approaches of cinema and audiovisual, Editions Mimesis, 2025, (co-edited with Fanny Cardin, C. E. Harris, Charlie Hewison, Anastasia Rostan and Barnabé Sauvage).

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Thinking a cinema of the Armenian Diaspora (1991-2017), Collection Cinéma(s), L’Harmattan, 2022.
Papers
« By writing, (re)becoming the subject of one’s history, A cross-reading of the personal writings of Pavel Juráček and Daňa Horáková, in communist Czechoslovakia », Ecrire l’Histoire, vol. 25, 2025, forthcoming.
, « Jules Verne’s Cold War: Thinking about contemporary history in two Verne films by Karel Zeman », Conference proceeding Telling History: Narratives and History in Imaginary Cultures, Laboratoire des imaginaires, Wieworka Editions, 2024, pp. 179-202.
 « Translating Transgenerational Trauma into Images – A Comparative Perspective on the Works of Chantal Akerman and Gariné Torossian »,  co-authored with Valentine Auvinet, in Michèle Benhaïm, Nina Faruggia, Vladimir Broda (eds.), Oedipe au cinéma, collection « Psychoanalysis and Social Bond », series, L’Harmattan, 2024.
« Leave no trace, History Live? », Revue d’Histoire Culturelle, n°6, 2023.
 
Conference Papers (selection)
« A speechless cinema: Czechoslovak New Wave and censorship » Doctoral Seminar “Silence !”, Université Paris Cité, April 2025.
Round-table discussion, « Milan Kundera and cinema », with David Čeněk, Mathieu Lericq, Anastasia Mamaeva, Christian Paigneau, Sorbonne university, october 2025.
« From impossible speech to suspicious documents, when the archive invites criticism », Conference « Ten years of Kinétraces association: Archives and cinema », Sorbonne Nouvelle University, november 2023.
« The “Forman Trio”, Individuals and collective work in four Czechoslovak films”, Afeccav Congress, « Collectives, bands and collaborations in cinema and audiovisual », Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, June 2023.
« Comparison of methods » : conference and discussion on research methods with Jeanne Pommeau, Université Paris 8, October 2021.
CEFRES Team, Non classé

Sabina Vassileva – Research & CV

“Gender of metabolism: enacting sexed bodies at the intersection of metabolic and sex hormones”

Research Area 2 – Norms and Transgressions

Contact: sabina.vassileva@soc.cas.cz

Sabina Vassileva is a doctoral candidate at Charles University, Prague. Her PhD dissertation, entitled Gender of metabolism: enacting sexed bodies at the intersection of metabolic and sex hormones contributes to CEFRES research area 2.

My dissertation project draws on the growing recognition that the increasing prevalence of metabolic conditions such as diabetes and obesity is shaped by a complex interplay of biosocial factors. These include (epi)genetics, contemporary food environments saturated with ultra-processed foods, socioeconomic precarity, psychosocial distress, and as I argue gender norms, roles, and relations, including gendered reproductive labor. I am particularly interested in how bodies undergoing hormonal fluctuations face heightened risks of metabolic complications due to the intra-actions between declining estrogen and testosterone levels, glucose metabolism, insulin resistance, insulin sensitivity, microbiome shifts, and gendered norms of care. These dynamics remain underexplored, as biomedical research has historically privileged stabilized (male) bodies in clinical trials and research design.

In my dissertation, I explore how biosocial gendered relations shape metabolic health and diagnoses such as diabetes and obesity. I examine how gender is enacted in metabolic health along three axes: self-care practices, clinical care, and biomedical research. My focus is on the hormonal intra-actions between metabolic and sex steroid hormones. I draw on a Baradian material-semiotic framework and build on critical feminist anthropology of hormones, which has foregrounded how hormones not only carry gendered imaginaries but also function as technoscientific tools of sex regulation and bodily governance. While sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone are often studied in isolation, their intra-actions with metabolic hormones like insulin or glucagon-like peptides remain largely sidelined in sociological research. To address this gap my work combines feminist anthropology of hormones with the notion of postindustrial metabolism that enables me to trace the mutual constitutions of gender and metabolism.

Methodologically, my PhD adopts a mixed-methods approach. I combine qualitative ethnography (semi-structured interviews and participant observation)—exploring embodied experiences and everyday practices of “doing metabolism” and “doing gender”—with critical discourse analysis of biomedical research on metabolism. My ethnographic partners include people with diabetes or obesity who undergo synthetic hormonal therapies: individuals navigating menopause, andropause, or gender-affirming hormone treatments. These bodily transitions are critical sites where gendered and metabolic regulation is negotiated. Through this research, I investigate how gendered metabolic norms are not only discursively repeated but also materially metabolized—becoming embedded in the design of metabolic technologies and medications used in care. For this purpose I use visual ethnography tools like hormonal mapping.

By tracing how gender is materially metabolized in bodies, care practices, and biomedical knowledge, my project offers a feminist rethinking of metabolism as a deeply gendered and politically regulated process. By focusing on hormonal intra-actions, the project foregrounds fluid and dynamic bodily processes and gives voice to bodies that are marginalized in biomedical research on metabolism and whose mutual shaping of sexed embodiments and living in gendered social relations is not sufficiently considered.

CV

Education

  • from 2024 till present: PhD student, Sociology, Prague.
  • 2021-2024: MA, Anthropology, Charles University, Prague
  • 2017-2021: BA, Philosophy, Charles University, Prague.

Participation in research projects

  • Since 2024: PhD-participant Technocultures of extended metabolism, [GA24-12497S], project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
  • Since 2025: Junior researcher, Strategie AV21: Umělá inteligence pro vědu a společnost, Využití AI při managementu diabetu 1. typu, project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
  • Since 2025: Junior researcher, Platform workers on the czech labour market, project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences

Recent academic activities (selected)

  • June 2025: “Looped in within algorithms: A biosocial case study of a diabetic living with artificial pancreas,” paper presented at STS nordic conference, Stockholm, Sweden
  • June 2025: “Unwriting design injustice: hormonal-algorithmic tinkering
  • with open-source diabetes care technology,” paper presented at SIEF conference, Aberdeen, UK
  • May, 2025: “Attending to risky attachments: a study of a DIY loop for diabetes care, paper presented at an academic workshop “STS concepts for the life as aftermath”, Munich, Germany
  • March, 2025: “Queer metabolism: de/stabilizations of sex and gender binaries in biomedical research on gender affirming care and metabolism”, paper presented at STS HUB conference, Berlin, Germany
  • November, 2024: “Opening the black box of algorithms,” invited lecture within undergraduate course “Společnost, technologie, tělenost,” Faculty of humanities, Charles University, Prague
  • July, 2024: “Digital interfaces, real inequalities: exploring algorhitmic opacity in the platformised Czech delivery sector,” paper presented at EASA conference, Barcelona, Spain.
  • July, 2024: “Chrononormativita z perspektivy genderu a politiky těla, “ invited lecture at Woods sympozium “Time at the tips of conifers”, Orlické mountains, Czech republic
  • June, 2024: “More than Numbers: Health, Digitalization, and Bioethnography,” paper presented at the 15th MAYS Annual Meeting, Bologna, Italy.

Recent publications

  • Borisova V., Vassileva S. 2025. „Caring for more-than-human metabolic health: Self-tracking technologies as tools of calculation and communication in obesity and type 1 diabetes care“. Archivio antropologico mediterraneo. 27 (1). http://journals.openedition.org/aam/10112

Canovas O, Conan L, Gille P, Martinez A, Miranda CK, Palmea K, Roubi T, Suarez M, Vassileva S & Aline Wiame, 2024. « La nature en guerre contre la vie. Une expérimentation d’écriture cyborg entre Guattari et Haraway », Sextant, 41. http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/11409

CEFRES Team

Michaela Rumpíková – Research & CV

“Young Women in Transition: A Phenomenological Reading of First-Person Coming of Age Stories”

Contact : michaela.rumpikova@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Research Area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

My doctoral research proposes a phenomenological reading of contemporary French coming-of-age fiction centred around the figure of the young girl. By perceiving the young girl as a body in the state of becoming, I take up the concept of “becoming a woman” (Beauvoir, then Deleuze and Guattari) in order to extend it to a broader understanding of becoming as a directed process, that is, one influenced by gender, class, race, and sexuality norms. In 2001, Tiqqun wrote “Like so many of our unfortunate contemporaries, the Young Girl took Western metaphysics at the foot of its aporias”. Integrated into late capitalism, feminine subjectivity is formed through the norms of seduction, performance and consumption, and their internal contradictions. Nevertheless, it cannot be reduced to a simple embodiment of this ideology. Far from being a passive symptom, it also constitutes a reaction to the impasses of the system: it is a question of adapting to it, negotiating a space within it, and of becoming in a world which has already frozen into an artificial image of it. All while attempting to break free from the narrow confines of this representation, her story attempts to sketch the outlines of her own subjectivity.

In terms of methodology, I draw on the triad of orientations-objects-others (Sara Ahmed) to examine how formative trajectories are shaped by external forces that determine accessible and desirable directions and shape our relationship to the world, objects, and others. This allows me to rethink coming-of-age not as a linear or teleological route, but as an active movement, a form of navigation within a relational and dialogical field, where the body is affected without end, moved, and reconfigured in its way of being in the world. I thus reinterpret the Bildungsroman as a narrative journey, a dialectic movement of experience: a space of disadjustment, of friction, and sometimes even failure, understood not as an individual fault, but as a symptom of the norms which organise the social space.

This research draws on a corpus of coming-of-age fiction in the first person which I refer to as the ‘fourth generation’, characterised by social mobility, post-identity and the porosity of belonging (i.e. Nina Bourauoi, Faiza Guène, Wendy Delorme, Lolita Pille, Emmanuelle Richard, Blandine Rinkel, Fatima Daas). By examining the ways in which young girls negotiate their place in a world that guides them before they even have the opportunity to choose their own direction, I explore what becoming (a woman) means today, and what narrative forms and textual strategies enable us to express, reshape or invent this becoming.

CV

Education

  • 2022 – present: PhD. candidate jointly supervised by Charles University and Sorbonne Nouvelle University (programme: French and comparative literatures); Thesis: Young Women in Transition: A Phenomenological Reading of First-Person Coming of Age Stories, under the supervision of Eva Voldřichová Beránková and Alain Schaffner
  • 2019 – 2021: Master’s at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (programme: French philology); Specialities: sexual identities and their representation in francophone literature, self-narrative, illness and auto-fiction; Dissertation: Hervé Guibert: the resurrection of the Author, under the supervision of Eva Voldřichová Beránková; Grade: excellent
  • 2015 – 2019: Bachelor’s at the Faculty of Education at Charles University (programme: French and English); Specialities: literary engagement, the literature of the Enlightenment and its emancipatory limits; Undergraduate dissertation: The emancipation of women in Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, under the supervision of Milena Fučíková; Grade: excellent

Exchange programmes

  • (2024) Vassar College (Department of modern literature)
  • (2022 – 2023) École Normale Supérieure (Department of literatures and language)
  • (2020 – 2021) Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Department of languages and literatures)
  • (2017 – 2018) Institut Catholique de Paris (Department of literature and language)

Publications

  • „Holky s bouchačkou: Odysea revolučního násilí v podání Virginie Despentes“, in: A2, 2025.
  • „Angažovat se od stolu“, in: Re:vize, 2025.
  • « Le chronotope de devenir-queer dans Arcadie (2018) d’Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam : le corps en Bildung », in : Silène, 2025. (publication to come)
  • « La vengeance au féminin : Civico et Burnier sous la tutelle de Despentes », collective volume under the supervision of Katarzyna Gadomska and Tomasz Kaczmarek, Lausanne : Peter Lang, 2024.
  • “Failing as a Literary Form of Queering”, collective volume codirected by Stefanie Mayer and Alex Lachkar, Vienna: Transcript, 2024.
  • « Floutage des frontières de genre : écrire le corps queer », collective volume under the supervision of Robert Karul and Andrea Turekova, Prague : Svet literatury 2024.
  • „Corporealita: tělo pod kapitálem“, in: Glosolalia, vol. 6, 2024.
  • „Co nenapíšu, to se nezavrší“, in: A2, 2024.
  • „Michel Houellebecq: islamofob a pornohvězda na poloviční úvazek“, in : Alarm, 2023.
  • « Hors centre et périphérie : La convergence littéraire dans l’univers de Vernon Subutex (2015 – 2017) de Virginie Despentes », in : Ostium, 2023.
  • „Marginalizace, patriarchát a emancipační boj u Virginie Despentes“, in : Alarm, 2023.
  • „Annie Ernaux: tělo a třídní boj”, in : Host, 2023.
  • „Marcel Proust a tajemství času”, in : Host, 2022.
  • „Emile Zola proti sociální slepotě“, in : H7O, 2022.

Conference(s), presentation(s), summer school(s)

  • (November 2025) International conference on the theme “Negotiating Safety. Literary and Cinematic Stagings of Tensions and Conflicts in Queer Spaces Since 1900” at the University of Vienna; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), “Queers at the Family Table: Negotiating the Self and the Family Through Space”.
  • (September 2025) Interdisciplinary workshop on “Rethinking the Emotions from a Historical Perspective” organised by Charles University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), “Feelings of Class Shame in Contemporary Literature: Failing to Feel Right”.
  • (August 2025) Interdisciplinary summer school of the theme “Guerre-Conflit-Résilience” in Štěkeň, organised by par the Jan Hus Association; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « Refuser la résilience : le récit du mal-être comme échec à résister à la négativité ». (publication to come)
  • (June 2025) International conference on the theme “Esthétiques queer et enjeux sociaux : décentrement”, organised by Clermont Auvergne University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « L’intimité éco-queer : « faire l’amour aux rochers, baiser les arbres ». (publication to come)
  • (May 2025) International conference on the theme “Colères féminines”, organised by the University of Amiens; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « On se lève et on se casse : le concept de la colère féministe chez Virginie Despentes et Wendy Delorme ». (publication to come)
  • (October 2024) International conference on the theme “Bildungsroman à l’épreuve des identités sexuelles” organised by Paris Nanterre University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « Le chronotope de devenir-queer dans Arcadie (2018) d’Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam : le corps en Bildung », 24th October, Paris.
  • (August 2024) Interdisciplinary summer school on the theme “Déchets et fragments” in Kosice (University of Kosice) organised by the Jan Hus Association; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « La poétique du fragment dans Le Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig », 5th July, Kosice.
  • (July 2024) Summer school in Poitiers (University of Poitiers), organised by OFFRES; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « Lecture phénoménologique queer de la jeune fille dans les récits de formation : devenir dans le monde », 5th July, Poitiers.
  • (April 2024) Presentation of a thesis chapter at Vassar College; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), “The (Young) Girl as Contemporary Character: Becoming War Machine”, 22th April, New York.
  • (March 2024) Doctoral seminar on the theme “Écrire contre” organised by Sorbonne Nouvelle University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), “Virginie Despentes and Literary Queering”, International conference “Queer/Feminist Relations in Fiction”, 15th March, Paris (online).
  • (October 2023) International conference on the theme “Queer Feminist Relations in Fiction” at the University of Vienna; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2023), “Virginie Despentes and Literary Queering”, International conference “Queer/Feminist Relations in Fiction”, 28th October, Vienna.
  • (August 2023) Interdisciplinary summer school on the theme “Le Flou” in Krahule organised by the Jan Hus Association.
CEFRES Team

Sophie Raehme – Research & CV

“Visualizing Resistance: The Traveling Graffiti “Las Cuchas Tienen la Razón” and the Ghostly Presence of Forcibly Disappeared Colombians in Europe”

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

My research broadly examines how state and non-state actors, as well as victim-survivors themselves, negotiate concepts of collective reparation for gendered, intersectional, and relational harm. I focus in particular on the possibilities and limitations of collective reparations within official processes of victim subject recognition. Using a relational ontological lens, I explore how frameworks of collective victimization are constructed and contested within transitional justice discourses and beyond and in particularly in relation to territorial memory, art, and resistance in the context of Colombia’s urban territorial peace. My work is grounded in critical, decolonial, queer, and feminist approaches to transitional justice, reparations, gender, and human rights. Between 2022 and 2024, I collaborated closely on participatory documentary projects with a women’s searcher collective and an LGBT group in Medellín. One of these projects is currently being re-edited and is planned for submission to a human rights film festival.

During my fellowship at CEFRES, I will explore the transnational dimensions of memory activism through the traveling graffiti “Las cuchas tienen la razón”, originally created by youth graffiti artists and women searchers in Medellín, Colombia. The project investigates how this visual intervention, symbolizing territorial resistance and youth and women-led struggles for truth, justice, and reparations, has been reinterpreted within the Latin American diaspora in European cities such as Vienna, Berlin and London. To study these translocated territorial memories in traveling graffiti, I adopt an exploratory methodology using the metaphor of ghosts. “Ghost ethnography” offers a conceptual framework to examine how trauma and absence are inscribed on bodies and urban spaces, particularly through muralism and graffiti. These forms of street art function as living archives of resistance, often overlooked in mainstream historiography and ethnography, yet central to grassroots memory practices. I will complement this with semi-structured interviews conducted with graffiti artists and women searchers.

At CEFRES, I aim to contribute primarily to Research Area 3, “Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces.” During my stay, I will present findings from my PhD research and screen the upcoming participatory documentary “Women Walking for Truth – Transforming Voices and Territorial Resistance” (2025).

CV

I hold a Master’s in Philosophy (2019) from Goethe University (Frankfurt) and a Master’s in International Studies / Peace and Conflict Research (2020) from the Technical University of Darmstadt. In 2024, I taught courses on feminist theory, climate repair, and art-based methodologies as a Global Teaching Fellow at the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá). In 2025, I was a visiting PhD researcher at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (Florence).

CEFRES Team

Nina Papcunová – Research & CV

“Nature in Modernism”

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

Contact: nina.papcunova@savba.sk

Nina Papcunová is a doctoral student at the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. Her dissertation, entitled Nature in Modernism, contributes to CEFRES Research Area 3.

The main objective of the thesis is to explore the cultural function of nature in Slovak literature between 1890 and 1925, corresponding to the poetic line of naturalism-symbolism-modernism. The research also focuses on the environmental awareness of modernist literature and its response to contemporary changes in the relationship between humans and nature (industrialization, war). The psychological aspects of the representation of nature will be equally relevant to the research. Thematically, the research will focus on motifs of natural disasters and destructive human interventions in nature, with an emphasis on their literary representation, aesthetic and functional use, and overall signification. The research will work with prose and poetic texts from a defined period and will cover many authors in the aim of capturing as many different approaches to the aforementioned themes and motifs as possible.

The methodology of the research is based on the theories of ecocriticism and ecopoetics (écopoétique; writing about nature – écrire la nature) applied to the study of modernism. Both theories focus on representations of nature in literary texts. While ecocriticism focuses primarily on the presence of nature in literature, ecopoetics examines in depth the aesthetic forms and shapes in which nature is captured in literature. Modernism as a period is often associated with the development of urbanization and thus also with urban space. Although nature appears in Slovak modernist texts, its depictions have not yet received significant attention from experts. My research presents an innovative approach to the defined issue on two levels: the core of the research is the representation of nature in a literary period that has so far been characterized by an interest in the city, and the research will be based on the use of ecocriticism and ecopoetics, which have not yet been significantly applied in literary research in our geographical area.

CV

Education

2024 – present: PhD candidate; Thesis: Príroda v modernizme (Nature in Modernism; La nature dans le modernisme), Institute of Slovak Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV), Bratislava

2019-2024: Master’s in Slovak and French language and culture with a specialisation in translation and interpretation, Comenius University, Bratislava

Additional education

2022-2024: Supplementary pedagogical studies focusing on teaching French – extension module, Comenius University in Bratislava

Recent publications

– Review in English of a publication by author Peter Adkins: The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (2024), SLOVENSKÁ LITERATÚRA (in print)

– Recenzia pri príležitosti vydania publikácie od autorky Mgr. Silvia Rybárová, PhD.: Dejiny, pamäť a osobný príbeh v súčasnej francúzskej próze (2024), SLOVENSKÁ LITERATÚRA, zv. 72, 2025, č.3