Team

Natalia Jarska, Ph.D. is a historian, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague),  Assistant Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History (Polish Academy of Sciences). Her research interests include women’s and gender history, history of sexuality, and labor history under state socialism.

Recent publications include the book Women of Marble: Women Workers in Poland 1945–1960 (in Polish) (Warsaw, 2015), and the articles “Modern Marriage and the Culture of Sexuality: Experts between the State and the Church in Poland, 1956–1970,” European History Quarterly 3 (2019); [with Kateřina Lišková and Gábor Szegedi] “Sexuality and gender in school-based sex education in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s”, The History of the Family, Volume 25, Issue 4 (2020), and [with Agata Ignaciuk] “Marriage, gender and demographic change: Managing fertility in state-socialist Poland”, Slavic Review 81 (1): 142-162.

In 2020–2021, she has been a visiting researcher at the Complutense University in Madrid, with a project entitled “Women's movement between national dictatorships and international agenda: comparing International Women's Year (1975) in Spain and Poland” (scholarship funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange). From July 2021, she is part of the “Expert Turn”.

Annina Gagyiova, Ph.D. joined the ExpertTurn project as a Postdoc-researcher specializing on socialist Hungary. Her research interests include the history of communism in Central- and Eastern Europe, history of everyday life, history of consumption and history of expertise in state-socialism.

After completing her studies in modern history and philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin she started her PhD as part of a collaborative project between the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, and the Czech Academy of Sciences funded by the VW-foundation. Under the supervision of Prof. Ulf Brunnbauer (IOS, Regensburg) she has completed her thesis which examines the question why socialism failed in Hungary although its consumption culture was more Western and colourful than anywhere else in the socialist bloc.

Her monograph on socialist consumption culture in Hungary was published by Harrassowitz with the title „From Goulash to Fridges. Individual Consumption between Eigensinn and Political Dominance in Socialist Hungary (1956-1989)“ in 2020. Prior to joining the ExpertTurn project she has been teaching at Charles University and other academic institutions in Prague.

José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas, Ph.D. is a  historian of modern Europe, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague). His research interests include the history of expertise in socialism, the history of everyday life and intellectual history.

He has been a researcher at the Lech Walesa Institute in Krakow and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and fellow at the Stiftung Ettersberg and the Central European University. In 2022 he completed a PhD at the University of Jena entitled "The Civilization of Leisure. Spain, East Germany, Europe and the Quest for Modern Holidays" which analyzed the intellectual design of leisure, the political implementation of holidays and the tourism experiences in Spain and the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s.

He has published a monograph, "The Intellectuals and the Gulag. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Spanish Culture (1973-1982)" (in Spanish) and his papers have appeared in journals such as German History, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies or Ayer.

As part of the ExpertTurn project he has participated in various conferences such as ASEEES, Baltic Connections or SSHA presenting on the medical discourses on pregnancy or infant mortality in East Central Europe from a comparative perspective.

Previous projects

• http://gk-ddr.uni-jena.de

Mgr. Theo Finsterschott is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Economic and Social History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. His main research interest lies in the history of non-normative sexuality. In his diploma thesis Sadism and Masochism in Medicalization and Culture During the Last Third of the Long 19th Century in the Czech and European Context, he examined the processes of construction of various concepts of sadism and masochism during the long 19th century in medical, journalistic and literary discourses. In his dissertation, he focuses on the notion of perversion.

In 2022–2023 he was a researcher in the TA ČR project Land Administration in Time and Space. In March 2023, he joined the ExpertTurn project.

Bc. Vjačeslav Glazov is a Mgr. student at the Institute of Economic and Social History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. In his current research, Vjačeslav focuses on masculinities in political culture of KSČ (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia). In his previous thesis, Čechohrad. An Insight into the Stalinist and Poststalinist transformation of the USSR, he examined the transformation of the Soviet society and state between stalinism and post-stalinism on the example of one small Czech village in Eastern Ukraine.

As a junior researcher, he worked on multiple projects, including Czechoslovaks in Gulag (ÚSTR) and Database of the History of the Everyday (HÚ AV ČR). In June 2023, he joined the ExpertTurn project.

Ing. Markéta Zelenková holds the position of Project administrator.

Since 2023 she has been part of the Office for Research and Project support at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Mgr. Šárka Caitlín Rábová, Ph. D. is a historian working at the Department of History at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of tuberculosis in Czech Lands, patient experiences and the issue of the relationship between physicians and patients.

Her master thesis titled Kulturní reflexe tuberkulózy v českých zemích 1800–1945 [Cultural Reflexion of Tuberculosis in Czech Lands 1800–1945] won the prize of Academia Publishing House of the Czech Academy of Sciences (2016), which also published her thesis in a special edition for junior researches. In 2017, she won the Prize of Zdeněk Horský for the best thesis in the field of history of science, technology and education.

In 2021, she finished her Ph.D. at the University of Pardubice and defended her doctoral thesis titled Etablování sociální choroby: tuberkulóza a společnost v 19. a 20. století [Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis and Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries], which should be published in 2022. In January 2022, she joined the team of ExpertTurn.

Markus Wahl, Ph.D. currently is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine, Robert Bosch Stiftung, in Stuttgart, Germany. In July 2021, he joined the team of ExpertTurn at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, investigating the human sciences in the German Democratic Republic. His research focuses on the modern history of Germany and the social history of medicine, including patient experiences, alcohol, pharmaceutical, and illegal drug addiction, diabetes, gender, minorities, and the concepts of normalcy, especially in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. He also has an affinity for the digital humanities and exploring new ways of analyzing data in history.

In 2017, Markus finished his Ph.D. at the University of Kent, United Kingdom, and his research was published with Routledge in 2019 titled Medical Memories and Experiences in Postwar East Germany: Treatments of the Past. He also was the editor of the book Volkseigene Gesundheit: Reflexionen zur Sozialgeschichte des Gesundheitswesens der DDR [Publicly Owned Health: Reflections on the Social History of the Healthcare System in the GDR], published with Franz Steiner in 2020, which resulted from a 2018 conference, where ERCs discussed new avenues in the historiography of healthcare and medicine in the German Democratic Republic. Recently, Markus was awarded an Honorary Research Fellowship from the University of Kent, United Kingdom.

His papers appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, and several anthologies.

Prof. Sławomir Łotysz is Professor of History at the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of sciences in Warsaw. He has conducted research and published in the history of technology and environmental history.

Recently, he has published: Knowledge as aid: Locals experts, international health organizations and building the first Czechoslovak penicillin factory, 1944–9 In Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan (eds.), “Europe’s Internationalists: Rethinking the History Internationalism”, London: Bloomsbury 2021; Niewykorzystany kapitał. Pomoc międzynarodowa a początki rehabilitacji zawodowej w Polsce po II wojnie światowej, „Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki”, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2021): 25-54.

Mgr. Andrea Bělehradová is a PhD candidate in sociology at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She graduated from sociology in the same department in 2015. Her M.A. thesis was devoted to the (development of the) therapy of sexual deviations in Czech(oslovak) sexology from 1948 until the present.

In 2018, she published the article “We Won’t Ban Castrating Pervs Despite What Europe Might Think!: Czech Medical Sexology and the Practice of Therapeutic Castration” in co-authorship with Kateřina Lišková in Medical History.

She is interested in the issues of gender, sexuality, ageing, and expertise under state socialism. Her current research focuses on the ageing sexuality in Czechoslovak expert knowledge during state socialism.

Marie Láníková is a PhD candidate in sociology at Masaryk University. She received BA in Gender Studies and Social Anthropology and MA in Sociology at Masaryk University.

She focuses on the socialist women’s movement, post-war Czechoslovak women’s organizations and their relationship with expertise, their approaches to domestic work and the problem of the second shift, as well as women’s agency under state socialism.

She published in Český lid: Etnologický časopis; Gender a výzkum; Studia paedagogica; or BalticWorlds.

Mgr. Eva Kicková holds the position of Project administrator.

Since 2017 she has been part of the Office for Research and Project support at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University.