Tag Archives: History

CEFRES Team, Non classé

Adam M. Aksnowicz – Research & CV

“Towards What Homeland?
(Trans)National Armies in Exile and Renegotiations of Polish and Czechoslovak National Narratives, 1938-48“

Contact: aksnowicz_adam@phd.ceu.edu

Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements,” and Descrepancies: People, Knowledge, and Practices

Adam M. Aksnowicz is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History, Central European University in Vienna, Austria. His dissertation, Towards What Homeland? (Trans)National Armies in Exile and Renegotiations of Polish and Czechoslovak National Narratives, 1938-48, under the supervision of Constantine Iordachi and Charles Shaw, is being developed in cooperation with CEFRES Research Area 1.

My dissertation reassesses the historical phenomenon of national armed forces in exile during the Second World War by analyzing military nation-building projects of Polish armies in exile and the Czechoslovak resistance abroad from transnational, comparative, and global perspectives. Building from my previous MA thesis entitled, “Without Lwów and Wilno There is No Poland” The Cause of Kresy in Exiled Polish Army Press and Propaganda in Italy, 1944-1946, my current project explores conceptual-historical complexities and persistent legacies of national-military exile(s) in renegotiations of nation, state, and homeland between the downfall of the young post-Versailles republics and the radical post-war reconstruction of East Central Europe. By contextualizing Polish and Czechoslovak military exile within transnational, global, and imperial-colonial entanglements of Europe’s early twentieth-century’ “age of catastrophe” (Doumanis 2016), I aim to move beyond dominant national-patriotic approaches and binary Cold War frameworks to contribute to new critical scholarship of exiled state apparatuses during WWII and engage with interdisciplinary discussions surrounding topics like exile, civil-military relations, transnationalities of nation-building, and collective narrative (re)construction.

As a researcher with a background in both sociology and history, my research to date has primarily focused on historical and collective memory studies of interwar, wartime, and early Cold War Poland/Polish diaspora in global contexts. However, during my time in Prague with CEFRES, I look forward to further developing the comparative Czechoslovak dimension of my dissertation by visiting the Czech state archives as well as discussing other analogous cases of exile/displacement with like-minded colleagues to strengthen the project’s overall conceptual framework.

Education

  • 2022 – current: PhD Candidate, Comparative History at Central European University, Vienna, Austria.
  • 2019-2020: MA, Comparative History at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
  • 2016-2018: MA, Sociology – Intercultural Mediation at University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland. Winner of the Dean’s Award for Best MA Thesis at UWr Faculty of Social Sciences (2018).
  • 2012-2014: BA, History at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Teaching Experience

  • 2023/2024 Fall: Teaching assistant in Comparative, Transnational and Global Histories: Rethinking Geographical and Temporal Scales, under the instruction of Balázs Trencsényi. Department of Comparative History at Central European University, Vienna, AT.

Conferences & Summer Schools

  • Presenter – (Non)Polish Army in Exile? Researching the Red Army’s Kościuszko Division Between History and Contested Memory. VIII Public History Summer School. The Historical Institute of the University of Wrocław, Poland (HI UWr), Wrocław, PL, 9-13 June 2025.
  • Presenter – Antisemitism, Propaganda, and Polish Armies in Exile during WWII. ComFas Summer School on Fascism, Antisemitism and the Holocaust: Theory, Methodology, and Case Studies. International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (ComFas), Rijeka, HR, 9-14 July 2023.
  • Presenter – Echoes of Wartime Trauma: Children of Polish Deportees Living in the West after WWII. XIX International Student Conference “Communication and Culture” at University of Wrocław, PL, 23-24 May 2018.
  • Presenter – The Holy Constitution? Sacred Roles of Historic Legal Text in Democratic Nation-States. IV International Conference “Law-Religion-Politics.” SKN Doctrines of Politics and Law at the University of Wrocław, PL, 13-14 April 2018.
  • Panel Moderator – Postwar Generations Remember (Concluding Panel). Kresy Siberia Foundation “Generations Remember” Conference at The History Meeting House, Warsaw, PL, 15-17 September 2017.
  • Presenter – Orange Dwarves and Pepe the Frog: A Comparison of Absurdity as Political Tactic by Poland’s Historic Orange Alternative and the Contemporary American Alt-Right. XVIII Annual International Student Conference “Communication and Culture” at the University of Wrocław, PL, 25-26 May 2017.

Publications and Projects

  • Nowy rozdział starej Res Publica Nowa, 4 July 2022.
  • A New Approach to CEE Communism Studies. Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989. Visegrad Insight, 5 October 2021.
  • Uses and Abuses of Political Appeals to ‘Civilization’: Kathryn Ciancia’s Book on Interwar Borderland in Poland. Visegrad Insight, 31 March 2021.
  • A Century of Demagogues in Europe: Ivan T. Berend’s Portraits of Populists between Past and Present. Visegrad Insight, 7 January 2021.
  • Co-Editor of The Polish Museum of America Visitor Brochure, Chicago, USA. Grant Project Funded by the Republic of Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, 2015.
  • Co-Creator of The Polish Museum of America’s Online Collections Database, Chicago, USA. Grant Project Funded by the Republic of Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, 2014. URL: https://polishmuseum.pastperfectonline.com/
CEFRES Team

Andrej Vašíček – Recherche & CV

“Cultural and Historical Memory of the Landscape in Hungary in the 18th Century”

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

Introduction

This dissertation examines the cultural and historical memory embedded in the rural and semi-rural landscapes of 18th-century Hungary. It explores how local communities perceived, shaped, and remembered their surroundings, focusing on the material traces, spatial practices, and symbolic representations that connected people to the land over time.

Research Questions

  • How was the landscape remembered and represented in legal, religious, and social contexts during the 18th century?
  • What material or symbolic traces of past uses and meanings can be identified in the landscape (e.g. crosses, boundary markers, hydrological structures, routes)?
  • How did natural features (rivers, forests, hills) become part of collective memory or identity?
  • In what ways did the transformation of the landscape—through cultivation, regulation, or settlement—affect the cultural memory of its inhabitants?

Methodology

The research combines approaches from environmental history, historical anthropology, and critical cartography. It draws on a variety of historical sources:

  • Urbaria and conscriptions, reflecting the socio-economic use of land.
  • Historical maps and cadastral plans, to track spatial organization and memory.
  • Parish records, inscriptions, and religious monuments, to trace symbolic landscape elements.
  • Narrative sources (such as local chronicles) for mental and lived geographies.

The project uses microhistorical case studies from specific regions of historical Upper Hungary to reconstruct the interaction between people and landscape.

Empirical Foundation:

The primary empirical basis includes:

  • Archival material from the Hungarian National Archives and Slovak regional archives.
  • 18th-century maps from military and ecclesiastical collections.
  • Fieldwork involving the documentation of surviving landscape features (e.g. stone crosses, remnants of old field systems, flood regulation structures).

Contribution to CEFRES Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping

The dissertation contributes to the understanding of landscape as a palimpsest of objects and traces—a space marked by layers of past meanings, uses, and representations. It proposes that the memory of place is not only transmitted through texts or rituals but also inscribed into the terrain through spatial practices and preserved physical remnants. By investigating how people inhabited and interpreted their environment, this research offers a historical perspective on the production of space, connecting tangible objects with intangible memory. It also engages in mapping these traces, both literally (through GIS) and conceptually, as a way to understand how landscapes become historical and cultural archives.

CEFRES Team

Kajetán Holeček – Research & CV 

“Jews in Cheb (Eger) in the High and Late Middle Ages”

Contact : kajetan.holecek[@]cefres.cz

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

My dissertation examines the Jewish position in the urban space of Cheb (Eger), a town on the Czech-German border. Given that the Jewish community in this town is among the oldest and most populous in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, it could be seen as representative of other medieval Jewish communities. The local context thus serves as a valuable case study for understanding the role of Jewish residents in the environment of medieval towns. The primary objective of my research is to define the role of Jews in medieval urban society by analysing social interactions within the urban space in answering the question: How should we speak and think of the Jews in the urban space?  Continue reading Kajetán Holeček – Research & CV  →

Other Activities, seminars

Czech-French Seminar in History – FF UK & CEFRES

Since 2007, CEFRES has teamed up with the Institute of Czech History of the Faculty of Arts (Charles University in Prague) around  a weekly seminar in history. Open to Prague’s French-speaking  students and to Erasmus students from France, the seminar hosts French historians around a unifying theme chosen every semester.

The theme for Winter Semester 2015-2016 is: “Travel and  Communication”.

See the program for the seminar and the workshop.

See the program of CEFRES sessions.

See on FF UK’s website.