I have been busy studying mainly religion within the last fifteen years and did a PhD in the study of religion in 2018. Nevertheless, I think one should not restrict oneself just to one field. Therefore, I enjoy combining different research perspectives and crossing the fields from the study of religion and history to social anthropology and heritage research.
From the wide array of religions one can research, I feel most attracted by the alternative religions and spiritualities. One of the reasons is that this will very likely become the ‘future’ of religion in Europe. It was especially modern Paganism that got my attention. I was wondering whether and how to research modern Paganism from a cross-cultural perspective because of my experience with India. (I travelled to India a few times and lived and studied with fantastic Indians in Czechia.) Hence, I have chosen to study the influence of Christianity on our culture, focusing on the example of modern Paganism for both my MA and PhD thesis. There are some articles I have published on this subject, and I think the best one (though perhaps not the best written) is the one in Nova Religio, which discusses the possibility of the existence of doctrines in modern Paganism. Currently, I am about to finish two book manuscripts from this journey through Paganism––one in Czech and the other in English.
While working on modern Paganism, I always thought of conducting research on occultism and wanted occultism to be my next research project. I have applied for the MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship with the University of Vienna because the Viennese Institute for the Study of Religion is the best place to work on esotericism in Central Europe.
Before coming to Vienna, I had a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (2019–2021) and have been accepted there for a tenured position in 2021. I was Jan Patočka Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, in 2021 and spent half a year as a visiting researcher at the Department for Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge in 2022. In 2023, I was awarded the Jan Hus Fellowship by the Jan Hus Educational Foundation for my research on modern Paganism. In the same year, I was given the Otto Wichterle’s Award – annually awarded honour to outstanding researchers not older than 35 years from various institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
You can download my full CV here.
At my academia.edu profile, you can find not only some of my articles but also public outreach activities like interviews or podcasts (for now only in Czech).