Team
Kateřina Lišková
The principal investigator in ExpertTurn
katerina@fss.muni.cz
Kateřina Lišková, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in sociology at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, expertise, and the social organization of intimacy, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. She is also affiliated as a guest researcher with the Department of History and Art History of Utrecht University.
In 2021, she was a Senior Fellow at the Descartes Center for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities. As a Marie Curie fellow, she was affiliated with Columbia University and Technische Universität in Berlin. Previously, she was at the New School for Social Research as a Fulbright Scholar; a Visiting Scholar with New York University; and a Fellow with the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, Germany. Cambridge University Press published her previous research in a monograph titled Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–89, which won the 2019 Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Book and received an honorable mention for the 2019 Adele E. Clarke Book Award.
Her papers have appeared in Medical History, History of the Human Sciences, History of Psychology, Sexualities, and History of the Family. She serves as an Editorial Board member for the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health.
Natalia Jarska
Natalia Jarska is a historian, 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 [forthcoming].
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
Annina Gagyiova 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, the history of consumption as well as the history of everyday life.
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.
Šárka Caitlín Rábová
Šárka Caitlín Rábová 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.
José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas
lopez-barajas@apps.fss.muni.cz
José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas is a cultural and social historian of modern Europe. He studied history at the University of Granada and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He has been a researcher at the Lech Walesa Institute in Krakow, the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and the Stiftung Ettersberg. His research interests include the history of communism, the history of everyday life and intellectual history.
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, "Los intelectuales y el Gulag. Alexander Solzhenitsyn en la cultura española (1973-1982)" and several articles in journals in journals such as German History, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies or Ayer.
Eva Kicková
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.
Past team members
Markus Wahl
Markus Wahl 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.
Sławomir Łotysz
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.
Andrea Bělehradová
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
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.