Calls for Applications, Join us

CFA – PhD Fellowships at CEFRES: France & Visegrad Countries

Call for application for 2nd year and above PhD students from France and the Visegrád countries 

Deadline for submission: March 16, 2025 (call closed)
Duration: September 1, 2025–August 31, 2026

CEFRES offers year-long fellowships at the center to 2nd year and above PhD students enrolled in universities in France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Fellows’ research should contribute to one of CEFRES’s research areas.

The amount of the fellowship is 12 000 EUR / 300 000 CZK per year.

Good command of English is mandatory, command of French is appreciated. The selected PhD fellows will join CEFRES team in Prague and actively take part in the Center’s scientific life.

Continue reading CFA – PhD Fellowships at CEFRES: France & Visegrad Countries →

CEFRES Team, Non classé

Kateřina Čapková

Kateřina Čapková, PhD. is an Asistent Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Her research and teaching focus on modern Jewish history in Europe, the history of Roma and Sinti, and refugee studies. Her monograph Czechs, Germans, Jews? won the Outstanding Academic Title Award from Choice magazine. Together with Hillel Kieval, she co-edited Prague and Beyond, a history of Jews in the Bohemian lands from the early modern period to the present, published also in German, Hebrew, and Czech. In 2016, Čapková initiated the establishment of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute of Contemporary History, which she has directed ever since. Since January 2025, the Prague Forum for Romani Histories has become one of the research centers of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. One of the on-going projects Čapková heads is www.romatestimonies.com, the world’s first systematic database of Roma and Sinti testimonies about the Second World War. In 2024, Čapková was awarded the prestigious Reimar Lüst Prize by the Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Education

  • 1997 – 2003: PhD in Czech History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
    III/2000 – VII/2000: INALCO Paris
    IX/1998 – VI/1999: Oxford University, OSI/FCO Chevening Scholarship
  • 1991 – 1997: Mgr. (corresponds with MA) in History and German Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
    IX/1994 – VII/1995: Universität Wien, ÖAD
    III/1994 – VII/1994: Universität Münster, DAAD

Research Stays Abroad

  • X/2024 – III/2025: Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien (Senior Research Fellow)
  • X – XII/2021: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (Humboldt Scholarship)
  • IX/2015 – VI/2016: University of Chicago (Visiting Scholar)
  • IX/2010 – VIII/2011, I – VI/2013: Freie Universität, Berlin (Humboldt Scholarship for Experienced Researchers)
  • I – VI/2005: Universität Basel (Bundesstipendium der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft)

Awards

  • Reimar Lüst Prize for 2024 awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation
  • Otokar Fischer Prize for 2022 awarded by Adalbert Stifter Verein and Institut pro studium literatury for Zwischen Prag und Nikolsburg (together with Hillel Kieval)
  • Otto Wichterle Prize for 2013 awarded by the Czech Academy of Sciences
  • Outstanding Academic Title for 2012 awarded by Choice. Current Reviews for Academic Libraries for Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia
  • Margarita Pazi Prize for Research of Bohemian Jewry awarded by Margareta Pazi Foundation, Tel Aviv, 2005-2006

Research Projects (selection)

  • 2024 – 2028: OP JAK, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, member of the research team
    Title: Beyond security: The role of conflict in building resilience (CoRe)
  • I/2024 – VI/2025: Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, PI
    Title: Zeugenaussagen von Roma und Sinti im Rahmen ihrer Suche nach Wiedergutmachung
  • 2019 – 2023: EXPRO Grant, Czech Grant Agency, PI
    Title: Genocide, Postwar Migration, and Social Mobility: Entangled Experiences of Roma and Jews, 19-26638X
  • 2018 – 2019: American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship
    Title: Zionists on Trial? The Slánský Affair and the Dynamics of Czechoslovak Stalinism (together with Chad C. Bryant and Diana V. Dumitru
  • 2016 – 2018: Junior Grant, Czech Grant Agency, PI
    Title: The Inclusion of the Jewish Population in Postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, 16-01775Y
  • 2016 – 2020: Book project funded by Thyssen Foundation, PI
    Title: Prague and Beyond. Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 20.15.0.075GE
  • 2007 – 2009: Volkswagen Stiftung, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, member of the research team
    Title: Die „Judenfrage“ im europäischen Vergleich
  • 2004 – 2006: Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences, PI
    Title: Jewish refugees in/from the Bohemian Lands, 1933-1939, B8994401

Membership in Committees, Editorial Boards (selective, only last 5 years)

  • Member of the Academic Advisory Board, The Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig, since 2020, re-elected in 2024
  • Member of the Editorial Board of East European Jewish Affairs, since 2021
  • Officer at-large, Czechoslovak Studies Association, since 2016, re-elected in 2019 and 2023
  • Member of the Steering Committee of the Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies, a joint program of the Faculty of Arts (Charles University) and the Czech Academy of Sciences, since 2019
  • Head of the Steering Committee of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories, since 2016
  • Member of the Steering Committee of CEFRES, 2016 – 2024
  • Co-editor (with Michal Frankl) of the book series Jews – History – Memory at Lidové noviny publishing house, since 2015
  • Member of the Advisory Committee of the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno in connection with the announcement of a competition for a memorial on the site of the former concentration camp in Lety u Písku, 2018 – 2019

Publications

Books

Edited Volumes:

Editions of Memoirs and Correspondence 

  • Jan Hauer, Moji lidi. Editors Renata Berkyová, Kateřina Čapková, Helena Sadílková. Prague: Kher, 2024.
    Review: Deník N.
  • Adolf Ornstein, Vilma Iggersová, Karl Abeles, Sto let jedné židovské rodiny na českém venkově. Editor Kateřina Čapková. Prague: Karolinum 2022. English version in preparation.
    Reviews: Judaica Bohemiae, Dějiny – teorie – kritika.
  • Raya Czerner Schapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg (eds.), Dopisy z Prahy 1939–1941. Editor of the Czech version Kateřina Čapková. Prague: Irene Press, 2017.

Academic Articles and Book Chapters (selection)

  • Undone from Within: The Downfall of Rudolf Slánský and Czechoslovak-Soviet Dynamics under Stalin (co-authors: Chad Bryant and Diana Dumitru), Journal of Modern History 95, December 2023/4, 847-886.
  • Erased from History. Jewish Migrants in Postwar Czechoslovakia, in: Kateřina Čapková, Kamil Kijek (eds.), Jewish Lives under Communism. New Perspectives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2022, 35-53.
  • Franz Kafka et le sionisme, Études Germaniques 75, 2020/1, 157-170.
  • Jüdinnen und Juden in der Tschechoslowakei und der Slánský-Prozess, In: Jörg Ganzenmüller (Hrsg.): Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland und Europa nach der Shoah. Neubeginn – Konsolidierung – Ausgrenzung (Europäische Diktaturen und ihre Überwindung, Schriften der Stiftung Ettersberg, 26). Köln-Weimar-Vienna: Böhlau, 2020, 127-136.
  • Refugees from Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s: ‘In the long run, people will go down here’, in: W. Borodziej and Joachim von Puttkamer, Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century. Routledge, 2020, 73-86.
  • Between Expulsion and Rescue: The Transports for German-speaking Jews of Czechoslovakia in 1946, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, spring 2018/1, 66-92.
  • Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland after the Second World War, Studia Judaica 19,  2016/1 (37), 129–155.
  • Judaïsme et nationalisme dans les correspondances d’Otokar Fischer, in: Marie-Odile Thirouin (ed.), «À vous de cœur…» André Spire et Otokar Fischer, 1922–1938. Prague: Musée de la littérature tchèque, 2016, 20-54.
  • Dilemmas of Minority Politics. Jewish Migrants in Post-War Czechoslovakia and Poland, in Displacement, Jewish Migration and Rebirth of Communities (1945-1967), ed. Manfred Gerstenfeld and Françoise Ouzan, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014, 63-75.
  • Germans or Jews? German-speaking Jews in Postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, Jewish History Quarterly, 2013/2, 348-362.
  • Die ‘Judenfrageʻ in der Frühphase der tschechischen Nationalbewegung in Die ‘Judenfrageʻ – ein europäisches Phänomen?, ed. by Manfred Hettling, Michael G. Müller and Guido Hausman, Berlin: Metropol Verlag 2013, 247-266.
  • ‘Ich akzeptiere den Komplex, der ich bin.‘ Zionisten um Franz Kafka in Kafka und Prag. Literatur-, kultur-, sozial- und sprachhistorische Kontexte, ed. by Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne and Marek Nekula, Köln-Weimar-Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2012, 81-95.
  •  Anti-Jewish Discourses in the Czech National Movement. Havlíček, Neruda and Kapper, Judaica Bohemiae 46, 2011/2, 77-94.
  • Raum und Zeit als Faktoren der nationalen Identifikation der Prager Juden, in Praha – Prag 1900 – 1945. Literaturstadt zweier Sprachen, ed. by Peter Becher and Anna Knechtel. Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz, 2010, 21-31.
  • Die jüdische Glaubensgemeinschaft, in Handbuch der Religions- und Kirchengeschichte der böhmischen Länder und Tschechiens im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by M. Schulze-Wessel and M. Zückert, Munich: Oldenbourg 2009, 187-208.
  • Mit Tribuna gegen das Prager Tagblatt. Der deutsch-tschechische Pressekampf um die jüdischen Leser in Prag, in Grenzdiskurse. Zeitungen deutschsprachiger Minderheiten und ihr Feuilleton in Mitteleuropa bis 1939, ed. by Sibylle Schönborn, Essen: Klartext, 2009, 127-140.
  • Kafka un der yidisher teater. Di misrakh-eyropeyishe yidn in di oygn fun proger yidn, Jerusholaymer almanakh, 2008/28, 362-371. (in Yiddish)
  • The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. by Gershon David Hundert, 2 vol, New York 2008, entries: Bar Kochba Association; Českožidovské Listy; Czechoslovakia (together with Michal Frankl and Peter Brod); Richard Feder; Angelo Goldstein; Tobias Jakobovits; Guido Kisch; Jindřich Kohn; Hayim Kugel; Emil Margulies; Gustav Sicher; Ludvík Singer; Friedrich Thieberger; Emil Utitz; František Weidmann; Gustav Winter; Židovská Strana [Jewish Party]; Židovské Zprávy.
  • ‘Nie wären wir geflüchtet.ʻ Im Gütterwaggon aus der Slowakei in die Schweiz, Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2005, 332-362.
  • Czechs, Germans, Jews – Where is the Difference? The Complexity of National Identities of Bohemian Jews, 1918 – 1938, Bohemia 46, 2005/1, 7-14.
  • Theodor Lessing – vom Außenseiter zum Symbol der antinazistischen Opposition, Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 2003, 11-32.
  • Specific Features of Zionism in the Czech Lands in the Interwar Period, Judaica Bohemiae 38, 2002, 106-159.
  • Jewish Elites in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The B’nai B’rith Order in Central Europe, Judaica Bohemiae 36, 2000, 119-142.
  • Piłsudski or Masaryk? Revisionist Zionism in Czechoslovakia 1925-1940, Judaica Bohemiae 35,1999, 210-239.
  • Das Zeugnis von Salmen Gradowski, Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente 1999, 116-122.May 2017, together with: Kamil Kijek, Stephan Stach
    New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism, Villa Lanna, Prague
Calls for Applications, Mobility, Visegrad > France

CFA – Joint Mobility Grant of the French Government And The Slovak Academy Of Sciences

Joint Mobility Grant of the French Government and the Slovak Academy of Sciences for young researchers in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2025

The French Embassy in Slovakia, the French Institute of Slovakia and the Slovak Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the French Centre for Research in Social Sciences (CEFRES), are offering a programme to support scientific stays in the field of humanities and social sciences in France during the year 2025. This programme is intended for young researchers working in institutes and centres of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The objective of this programme is to support Slovak-French cooperation in this field through a two-month research stay in France. Consequently, applications will be submitted individually by young researchers.

The ambition of the programme is to create sustainable research synergies between French and Slovak partners working in collaborative networks on innovative and interdisciplinary research topics in humanities and social sciences.

Continue reading CFA – Joint Mobility Grant of the French Government And The Slovak Academy Of Sciences →

Calls for Applications

CEFRES is hiring a Communications Manager

CEFRES in a nutshell

  • a French public research institution with partnerships throughout Central Europe
  • an international research and administrative team (12 nationalities by 2024), developing cutting edge research projects in the humanities and social sciences
  • twenty in-house researchers & fifty associates
  • about fifty events a year
  • some twenty funding grants.

Responsibilities and tasks

  • Maintaining a dynamic content calendar with the administrative team;
  • Administrating CEFRES’s trilingual website, ensuring it is updated with the latest information, www.cefres.cz (WordPress);
  • Writing and producing engaging content for CEFRES’s trilingual accounts on social media (FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, X);
  • Producing visual contents (website, social media, posters and programs) for scientific events
  • Analyzing data to gauge content performance and proposing communication strategy in accordance

Expected skills

  • Exceptional written Czech skills (C2), French (C1 or B2) and English (C1 or B2),
  • In-depth knowledge of social media and their monitoring tools
  • Experience in translation
  • Experience in updating websites using content management systems
  • Experience in creating visual contents – video cuts if possible

Required qualities

  • Excellent interpersonal skills, proactive
  • Exacting and precise written skills,
  • Esthetic visual taste,
  • Reliable and autonomous,
  • Collaborative team player with a positive attitude.

Qualification

  • Degree in communication management / digital marketing / languages OR equivalent experience,
  • Enthusiastic interest in communication and translation;
  • A strong curiosity toward Humanities and Social Sciences is more than welcome.

Conditions & benefits

  • 1-year fixed-term Czech law contract, with possibility of extension
  • Part-time job according to candidate’s profile and needs: 15h attendance / week preferred
  • Flexible working schedule apart one fixed day at CEFRES
  • 14 days’ annual leave
  • Long Summer breaks with no scientific event,
  • Professional training offered by CEFRES according to the profile and needs of the employee
  • French language courses offered by CEFRES at the French Institute in Prague
  • An office in Prague city center, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
  • Reduced prices of access to the cinema Kino 35 at the French Institute in Prague

How to apply

  • The position is to be filled on 1/2/2025 · Send your CV and motivation letter in French to: Claire.madl@cefres.cz Subject:« Candidature au poste de chargé/e de communication et de traduction »; Cc mateusz.chmurski@cefres.cz.

Only selected applicants will be invited to be interviewed, in French.

CEFRES Team

Katarína Bednárová – Research & CV

Research area 1: Displacement, ‘dépaysements’, and discrepancies: people, knowledge, and practices

Contact: katarina.bednarova[@]savba.sk

Katarína Bednárová works as senior researcher at the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS) and as professor at the Department of Romance Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. She has cooperated with the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences CEFRES since September 2024 on her research on social studies and humanities translations, history of literary translations, and surveys of cultural transfers and literary reception in the 20th century.  Since 2022 she has lead the APVV-21-0198 research project Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century at the Institute of World Literature SAS. Her work falls into the scope of the 1st CEFRES research area, Displacement, ‘dépaysements’, and discrepancies: people, knowledge, and practices. Continue reading Katarína Bednárová – Research & CV →

Non classé

CFP | A European Middle Ages | Doctoral Workshop EHESS–CEFRES

A European Middle Ages. Circulation of objects, practices, and techniques between Central and Western Europe (1000–1600)

Fourth PhD Students Workshop organized within the cooperation agreement signed by EHESS, CEFRES, Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Date: 24 April, 2025
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1 (and online)
Deadline for application submissions: 31 January, 2025
Notification to authors: 28 February, 2025
Language of the workshop: English

Convenors:

  • Lise Saussus, Center of historical research, UMR 8558, School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences
  • Jakub Sawicki, Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
  • Tomasz Cymbalak, National Heritage Institute, Prague
  • Nicolas Thomas, National Institute of Preventive Archeological Research, Laboratory of Western Medieval Studies, Paris

Continue reading CFP | A European Middle Ages | Doctoral Workshop EHESS–CEFRES →

French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague