Seminars 2023–2024

RETHINK. Objects, models, and methods in Humanities and Social Sciences since the invasion of Ukraine

Seminar within the program of the CEFRES non-residential fellowships for Ukrainian scholars in humanities and social sciences, 2023.
From May 2023, the CEFRES Ukraine fellows in Humanities and Social Sciences remotely present their current research projects in discussion with Czech, French, and international specialists of respective fields. Our goal is to analyze what the Russian invasion has done to our disciplines, objects, methods of research and ways of thinking.

CEFRES Seminar 2023–2024

CEFRES monthly research seminar enables CEFRES to fulfill its mission to train young researchers welcomed at the center.

Since Autumn 2021, CEFRES gathers in a Research Seminar all its PhD fellows and researchers opened to young researchers and to MA and PhD students of its partners, within “CEFRES Platform” and in the four Visegrad countries.

Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented. The seminar can be led by a single researcher or in pairs, be based on a reading or a document, or welcome an external researcher invited to present particularly inspirative work.

CEFRES Francophone Interdisciplinary Seminar. Map and Border

In keeping with the traditions of CEFRES, the interdisciplinary seminar proposes to bring together one Friday per month, researchers, doctoral students, alumni and French-speaking friends of the Center to discuss issues at the crossroads of their respective disciplines. In 2023-2024, we began by questioning the very act of delimiting and representing (a territory, a period, a trajectory), in short, using the crossfire of our respective disciplines, to question the map and the border.

The normalized, the normalizers and their cinemas: Czechoslovak and Soviet Films of the 1970s

What structural changes do Czechoslovak studios undergo in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion? What thematic and aesthetic choices can be attributed to their moment in film history on both sides of the Iron Curtain? How does the soaring number of light entertainment genre like melodrama, comedy or musical correlate with the current events? Last but not least, the questions of actors’ agency in the face of state repression and censorship, of reevaluation of the immense corpus of films created during the late-Communist era feel relevant in Russian and Central European cinema and culture in general today.

French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague