Team

Don Sparling is a Canadian who attended the Universities of Toronto and Oxford before coming to Czechoslovakia in 1969. Here he has lived and taught in Brno and Prague, working in language schools and then at Masaryk University in Brno, first in the Department of English and American Studies (where he twice served as Chair) and later, from 2000 to 2009, in the university’s Office for International Studies, in the position of Director. Since its inception in 2005 he has taught on the joint Masaryk University - University of Toronto summer school in Brno, which focuses on the history and culture of the Central European region.

Zuzana Ragulová (*1987) is architectural historian specialized in the first third of the 20th century and Jewish architecture. Her bachelor´s thesis focused on the City Accommodation Bureau, which was built in Brno in 1928. Her master´s thesis dealt with the Sochor family villas in Dvůr Králové nad Labem in the early 20th century. She co-organized the international Ph.D. student conference "Admired as Well as Overlooked Beauty", held in Brno in 2014. In June 2015, she participated in the "II coupDefouet International Congress" in Barcelona, presenting the paper Czech Art Nouveau Architecture in the Cities of Prague, Brno and Hradec Králové. In 2014 and 2015, she taught a seminar at Masaryk University about architecture in Bohemia in the early 20th century. Since 2016 she has also taught architectural history courses and seminars at Tomas Bata University in Zlín.

Tomáš Pospíšil currently serves as Vice Dean for International Relations of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University. At the Department of English and American Studies, he teaches American literature, American and Canadian film and American cultural studies. He was an ACLS visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1993/94) and Fulbright fellow at the University of Southern California (1999). His current research interests involve African American film representation, Canadian feature film, and the reception of American culture in the Czech lands.

He is the author of The Progressive Era in American Historical Fiction: Dos Passos’ 42^nd Parallel and Doctorow’s Ragtime (1998), Průvodce cestovatele Amerikou (A Traveler’s Guide to America) (2001), Sambo tu již nebydlí? Obraz Afroameričanů v americkém filmu 20. století (Sambo Does Not Live Here Anymore? The African American Representation in American Film of the 20th Century, 2003). He also co-authored the volume Us-Them-Me, the Search for Identity in Canadian Literature and Film (2009) and edited a special issue of Brno Studies in English entitled The Five Senses of Canadian Cinema (2013).

Gábor Oláh is a recent Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University, where he also works as a lecturer. He graduated from the Academic Study of Religions (2006) and Sociology (2008) and these fields form the background for his academic and research interests. Recently, he has been working on the topic of performativity of collective memory from a cultural-sociological perspective. His dissertation focuses on issues such as cultural trauma, event theory, iconicity, and materiality. His field of research is in Budapest, Hungary, where he explores statues, memorials, squares, and museums that provide conflicting meanings and are produced and maintained by interpretive and memory communities (Oláh & Szaló, forthcoming).

He participates in the department as a lecturer in the courses Introduction to Cultural Sociology, Sociological Theory, and General Sociology. He is in charge of organizing the Sociology department’s annual international conference Identities in Conflict, Conflict in Identities and the International Summer School on Cultural Sociology: Memory, Culture & Identity. He was a research group member in the projects Collective Memory and Transformation of Urban Space (2012-2014) (Oláh 2013) and Detraditionalization and Individualization of Religion in the Czech Republic (2006-2008) (Oláh, Hamar, & Ondrašinová 2008).

Since 2013, he has been an actively participating member of the curatorium of the non-profit Unfinished Past Foundation, which focuses on recent social and cultural problems in regional and global correlations. The first result of the foundation is the book Transnational Politics and the History of the Memory of the Holocaust (Zombory-Szász 2014 - published in Hungarian).

Oláh speaks Hungarian as his mother tongue. He was born in Slovakia and now lives in Brno, in the Czech Republic. He has a four-year-old son whom with he frequently goes to spot trains.

Jaromír Sobotka (*1991) is a historian and publicist focused on the 19th and 20th century, with the emphasis on political, social and military history. Certainly, he studies Ph.D. at Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University and works as a researcher at the Masaryk Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences. Since 2014 he publishes as an author in historical and military magazines in Extra Publishing, he is also an active member of Historia Europeana, the association of academics interested in modern European history and AEGEE Europe, international organization and forum of European students and youth.

Sobotka finished his master studies in February 2017 with a thesis about the political mythos of Karl Marx in early socialist movement (nominated for the price of Academy of Sciences), his bachelor in 2014 with thesis about relations between Social democracy and cooperatives in 19th century (nominated on price of Dean of Faculty of Arts). During his studies, he co-organized the international academical conference Rethinking 20th Century European History, and four AEGEE Summer Universities focused on non-formal education.