Lara Bonneau
Contact: lara.bonneau@cefres.cz
is a PhD student at Paris I University under the supervision of Danièle Cohn. Her dissertation in philosophy is entitled Form and orientation in Aby Warburg’s thought and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 1.
Monika Brenišínová
Contact: monika.brenisinova@cefres.cz
is a PhD student at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague (CEFRES Platform PhD Fellowship), under the supervision of Markéta Křižová. Her dissertation is entitled From Monastery to Man – the Meaning of Monastic Architecture and its Art in 16th Century New Spain, is at the crossroad between art history, cultural anthropology and history, and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 1.
Mátyás Erdélyi
Contact: matyas.erdelyi@cefres.cz
is a third-year PhD student at the Central European University in Budapest under the supervision of Karl Hall and Susan Zimmermann. His dissertation is entitled The Making of a Productivist Middle Class in the Habsburg Monarchy, is at the crossroad between history and sociology, and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 1.
Jana Vargovčíková
Contact: jana.vargovcikova@cefres.cz
is a PhD student under the joint supervision of Milan Znoj at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and Georges Mink at Paris-Nanterre University (CEFRES Platform PhD Fellowship). Her dissertation in political sciences is entitled Modes of Legitimating Lobbying in Central Europe and their Ambivalences and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 2.
Edita Wolf
Contact: edita.wolf@cefres.cz
is a PhD student at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague (CEFRES Platform PhD Fellowship) under the supervision of Milan Bažil. Her dissertation is entitled Seneca, Tragedy and Judgment, is at the crossroad between philosophy, history and law, and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 2.
My research explores the making of a ‘productivist’ middle-class and their battle for social legitimation, intellectual authority, and middle-class identity in the Habsburg Monarchy between the 1867 Ausgleich and the aftermath of the Great War. In this study I analyze who became engaged in the battle for social recognition, what their motivations (scientific, social, economic) were, and what themes and social issues they considered important in their professional and private endeavors. A special emphasis is put on the relation between the educational system, with its inherent role in the knowledge production of specialized disciplines, and the economic and social modernization of the Dualist Monarchy. Here, my approach focuses on how educational change (e.g. the rise of professional education) could be interpreted from the perspective of its social effects or even in terms of economic causes. My research also includes the analysis of various types of white-collar work in early urban capitalism, especially from the perspective of how the struggles around class, status, and power were represented and negotiated in the public sphere and in related scientific endeavors by our protagonists. In this vein, selected case studies deal with the practices of accounting, banking, insurance business, engineering, and transportation.
The research project seeks to analyse the stakes behind the concept of judgement in the light of Seneca’s tragedies. In such works, judgement stands as a decision-making process within the frame of Stoicism, as a decision of the judicial authority under the Roman Empire and last, as a part of tragedy as genre. Legal procedure formalising the decision making, the new constellation of the judicial field in the imperial era raised new questions about the nature of judgement in general, including that of moral and aesthetical judgement. The aim of this research is to explore how the formalising of assessing and decision making processes, especially in legal procedure, are being questioned–since they are at the origin of European law. This will lead to reflecting upon judicial authority and judgement. Grounded in the study of classics, this survey of the judgement in the works of Seneca should enable to look into the precondition of social sciences topics and the study of law, without being embedded in their methodology.