First session of the 2024-2025 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar “Dépaysements”: Clues and Trajectories.
In 2023 we started questionning the very act of bordering and representing (a territory, a period, a trajectory). In short, thanks to the interdisciplinarity of our respective disciplines, we began inquiring into the question of the map and the border.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday October 17, 2025, from 10 am
Language: French
Speaker: Hugo Mosneron DUPIN (Doctor candidate in Economic Philosophy at the ENS – PSL & the CIRED)
Discussant: tba
Abstract
L’échange écologiquement inégal est un concept qui entend matérialiser les théories critiques du développement en faisant ressortir les conséquences environnementales et territoriales des inégalités de richesses entre les pays. Aux théories de l’échange inégal qui tentent d’expliquer le blocage de certaines économies dans un modèle d’export de biens à faible valeur ajoutée, elles ajoutent une évaluation non plus économique mais physique de ces échanges internationaux : les pays les plus développés drainent les ressources naturelles notamment énergétiques des pays les moins développés en capturant une portion de ces territoires pour les dédier à l’économie d’export. De ce fait la notion d’échange écologiquement inégal permet d’interroger le dépaysement dans une double direction : d’abord l’export constitue au sens littéral un dépaysement, un transfert hors des frontières d’une entité qui transporte avec elle une dimension – ici écologique – de son pays d’origine ; ensuite la transformation d’un territoire pour produire des denrées qui seront vendues à l’étranger peut être considérée comme un dépaysement non plus seulement des biens mais du territoire producteur lui-même. En effet, la théorie de l’échange écologiquement inégal montre que ces territoires peuvent être considérés comme des enclaves écologiques du pays importateur dans le pays exportateur. Nous conduirons ces réflexions en nous appuyant sur une lecture croisée d’Underdeveloping the Amazon (Stephen Bunker, 1987) **- ouvrage fondateur de cette approche – et d’une étude concrète d’échange écologiquement inégal sur l’exploitation intensive de crevettes en Equateur par l’écologue Howard Odum (1991).
See the complete program of the 2024-2025 seminar here.
2nd session of CEFRES in-house seminar
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.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Speaker: Nina PAPCUNOVÁ (CEFRES / SAS)
Discussant: Eva KRÁSOVÁ (CEFRES / Charles University)
Abstract Continue reading The Spaces of Nature in Slovak Literary Modernism (1890-1925) →
1st session of CEFRES in-house seminar
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.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, September 23, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Speaker: Andrej VAŠÍČEK (CEFRES / FiF UK)
Discussant: Markéta ŠANTRŮČKOVÁ (Department of Cultural Landscape and Sites, Research Institute for Landscape and Ornamental Gardening – VUKOZ v.v.i)
Abstract
The lecture approaches the sacred landscape as a dynamic network of places and routes shaped by Baroque piety, diocesan reorganization and everyday practice. It combines historical geography with GIS to reconstruct how churches, chapels, Calvaries, crosses and cemeteries formed spatial hierarchies and itineraries. Cartographic sources are treated interpretively and cross-checked against canonical visitations, schematisms, municipal and parish records, epigraphy and field observation. A micro-case from the town of Púchov demonstrates hydrological and transport thresholds, the relocation of burial grounds extra muros and the dating power of chronograms. The talk proposes a transferable workflow for the historical-geographical reconstruction of sacred layers in Central Europe and reflects on practical uses in heritage management, spatial planning and public engagement.
Please find the complete program of 2025–2026 seminar here.
10th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
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.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Speaker: Honorata Sroka (CEFRES / Charles University)
Chair: Hélène Martinelli (CEFRES / École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
Text to be read: Peter Bürger (1974). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translation Michael Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Abstract
The presentation will take the form of very preliminary remarks related to my post-doctoral research, which I have been conducting for 7 months at the French Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences. My project develops the same line of research as my doctoral thesis, however, approaches the issue in a broader way. Specifically, using selected examples of neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe, I hope to show how and why artists decided to create subversive forms of historiography and what kind of experimental strategies can be found in archives. Employing the methodology so-called “cultural history of the avant-gardes”, I will reflect on vanguard institutions and practices oriented towards a self-historiography. What I dare to claim one can essentially call a discussion on Peter Bürger’s pivotal book Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). He was the one who argued that the avant-gardes stood against institutions. In contrast to his assumption, my research aims to display how neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe developed rather than destroyed art institutions, as well as subversive forms of historiography, and why these two were intertwined.
Please find the complete program of 2024–2025 seminar here.
Polish Communities in France and in the United States after WW2 and their Political Practices
9th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
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.
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English
Speaker: Florence Vychytil-Baudoux (EHESS / CEFRES)
Chair: Françoise MAYER
Text to be read: Michael Werner & Bénédicte Zimmermann, « Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity », History and Theory, 2006, vol. 45, no 1, p. 30‑50.
Abstract:
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, over 12 million people left Polish territories “za chlebem” (for bread). While before WW1 the United States attracted most Polish peasants looking for a better future, it was France that became the main destination for Polish migrants in the interwar period. Continue reading Transatlantic Crossings | CANCELLED →
Eighth session of the 2024-2025 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar The Map and the Border
In 2023 we started questionning the very act of bordering and representing (a territory, a period, a trajectory). In short, thanks to the interdisciplinarity of our respective disciplines, we began inquiring into the question of the map and the border.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday May 23, 2025, from 10 am
Language: French
Speaker: Gilles LEPESANT (CEFRES / CNRS)
Discussant: Barbora Kvasničková (Research fellow at AMO – Association for International Affairs)
Abstract Continue reading Energy and its Renewed Cartography →
