Barbora Spalová returns to CEFRES, where she was an intern during her studies at Charles University, now as a religious anthropologist. In January 2026, she will begin working with Anne Fornerod on a Tandem project which aims to create a larger European project entitled Agency of presence and absence of religious buildings.

Barbora Spalová studied ethnology and social anthropology at Charles University in Prague. While working on her dissertation, she began to focus primarily on the anthropology of Christianity in combination with studies of memory and public space. Her published dissertation is entitled God Knows Why. A Study of Memories and Power Regimes in Christian Churches in Northern Bohemia (2012). Her postdoctoral project continued in the field of memory studies and focused on the management of tangible and intangible traces of the German past in the Czech and German border regions (in collaboration with social geographer Paul Bauer). Within the field of anthropology of Christianity, Barbora Spalová focuses on the relationships between churches and societies, especially in Central Europe, where they are marked by years of state atheism, lived spiritualities and ecclesiologies and their political-economic aspects, as well as specific manifestations of post-secularism in this region, new configurations of the religious, spiritual, and secular. More than ten years ago, she also began to study the renewal of monastic life after 1990 in former Czechoslovakia, and this interest led her to new monastic communities in California in 2022-2023. Both old and new monasticism remain a field of research for Barbora Spalová, and this will also be the case within the Tandem project at CEFRES.

The aim of Tandem is to connect researchers from many fields who could jointly prepare a project in which churches and monasteries in Europe will be examined as agentive phenomena that are not only monuments worthy of conservation, but actively enter into spatial, emotional, political, economic, symbolic, and social relationships with their surroundings and are established by these relationships, just as they help to reestablish their surroundings again and again. In short, we ask: what does the presence or absence of churches and monasteries “do”?

CV

ORCID: 0000-0002-6930-709X; Researcher ID: K-5288-2015; Scopus ID: 26668023100

Education and key qualifications

31/05/2009 PhD. in Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences / Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

2001 M.A. in Ethnology, Faculty of Arts/ Institute of Ethnology Department, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

Current position(s)

2014 – present Senior lecturer and researcher , Faculty of Social Sciences / Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

Previous position(s)

2022 – 2023 Fulbright Visiting Scholar, School of Humanities and Sciences/ Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA 2013 – 2017 Junior member of a research cluster / team of the University Centre of Excellence for the Research of Collective Memory , Faculty of Social Sciences / Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic

Research experience

Grants and fellowships since PhD (in the position of project leader)

2026 – 2026 Agency of presence and absence of religious buildings, TANDEM Cefres CU-CNRS (with Anne Fornerod)

2022 – 2023 New monastic communities and networks: Spirituality arising from the contradictions of secular societies (Fulbright – Masaryk scholarship at Stanford University, California)

2019 – 2022 Dynamics of churches´ moral economies in the Czech and Slovak Republics in the context of restitutions of church properties and church-state (Grant Agency of the Czech Republic)

2019 – 2022 Society and church in the process of restitution of church properties: Support of participation (Technological Agency of the Czech Republic)

2016 – 2017 Moral economy of Czech and Austrian monasteries (Aktion Czech Republic- Austria)

2012 – 2014 Space and Social Memory in the Czech Borderlands after 1990: Post-Socialist Management of Tangible and Intangible Traces of the German Past (postdoc project, Grant Agency of the Czech Republic)

Grants and fellowships since PhD (in the position of researcher)

2024 – 2026 The role of religion in the integration of migrants from Ukraine and changes in the Czech religious landscape. Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, led by Tomáš Havlíček

2023–2024 Post-secular Approach to Memory Processes in Central-Eastern Europe, Visegrad Funds, led by Zuzana Bogumil

2013 – 2014 On the way to the spirituality of collaboration? The laymen and clergy in the Czech Catholic church. In the frame of the project Identity of clergy in the 20th century, led by Jiří Hanuš

2008 – 2010 How is the religious reality produced? Apparitions and possessions as a practical and collective endeavor. Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, led by Zdeněk Konopásek

Selected publications

Spalová, B., Pelikán, V., & Liška, M. (2024). Religious–secular as non-competitive: Encouraging participative church in a Czech Catholic diocese. Social Compass, 71(2), 365–386. DOI

Spalová, B., & Gajdoš, A. (2024). Church Life LIVE! Ritual innovations and repertoires of belonging in Czech and Slovak Christian communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, 10(1), 252–280. DOI

Spalová, B., Lukeš Rybanská, I., Gajdoš, A., Tížik, M., Frantová, V., Nosál, M., Pelikán, V., Beláňová, A., Čada, K., Pařil, V., Müllner, V., & Parks, T. (2023). Vize zdaru, vize zmaru: Proměny církví v Česku a na Slovensku v kontextu restitucí [Visions of success, visions of failure: Transformations of churches in Czechia and Slovakia in the context of restitutions of church properties] (1st ed.). Praha: Karolinum. ISBN 978-80-246-5623-6.

Spalová, B., & Tesárek, J. (2022). Other time: Construction of temporality in contemporary Benedictine monasteries. In M. Brenišínová & L. Panušková (Eds.), (Trans)missions: Monasteries as sites of cultural transfers (pp. 113–128). Archaeopress. PDF

Spalová, B. (2022). Discretio and the golden mean: Working out frugality and thrift in two Czech post-socialist monasteries. In C. Alexander & D. Sosna (Eds.), Thrift and its paradoxes: From domestic to political economy (pp. 117–139). Berghahn Books. Dokumen.pub

Spalová, B. & Jonveaux, I. 2021. Monastère et société : les échanges entre le monastère et la société dans le contexte des restitutions des biens ecclésiaux. Social Compass, 68(4), 634-652. DOI

Spalová, B., & Lukeš Rybanská, I. (2021). Translating secular–religious divide: Everyday negotiation of Christian distinctiveness in Catholic schools in Czechia and Slovakia. Journal of Beliefs and Values, 43(4), 375–395.DOI

Jonveaux, I., & Spalová, B. (2018). The economy of stability in Catholic monasteries in the Czech Republic and Austria. Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, 9, 269–296. DOI

Spalová, B. (2017). Remembering the German past in the Czech lands: A key moment between communicative and cultural memory. History and Anthropology, 28(1), 84–109. DOI

Spalová, B. (2017). Remembering the German past in the Czech lands: A key moment between communicative and cultural memory. History and Anthropology, 28(1), 84–109. DOI