Department of Modern Cultural and Social History

Areas of Focus

The Department of Modern Cultural and Social History comprises three segments:

• Memory Studies and the History of Everydayness
• Social History 
• Multicultural History 

Memory Studies and the History of Everydayness

The segment of Memory Studies and the History of Everydayness collects and digitizes memory texts, publishes monographs based on those texts, and maintains a discussion and work platform for researchers and research institutions who take an interdisciplinary approach to exploring topics from the history of everydayness, sites of memory, and the study of collective memory and identity. The linking of memory studies and the history of everydayness requires collaboration between several disciplines, such as classical history, oral history, sociology, and ethnography. It also reveals the factographic tension between the official historiography and individual memory recorded in texts written by nonhistorians. The segment attempts to methodologically bridge this gap and develop its own conception of the relationship between the official historiography and individual and collective memory with respect to fundamental topics of Czech historiography.

Social History

In the broadest sense, the Social History segment pursues the key discipline of societal development in the modern period not only in interaction with economic history, family business history, gender history, and labour history but also in dialogue with sociology, historical statistics, and historical anthropology. The segment places particular emphasis on reestablishing labour history as a subject of intensive historical research and on a new methodological approach to the history of Jews in the Czech lands. Research into the history of women is anchored in the conviction that the life experiences of women are distinctly different from those of men and constitute a topic that has yet to receive adequate attention. Social history also encompasses the history of social and political movements as well as biograms of individual actors in the process of modernization and increasing social conflict. The segment focuses not only on history from below (people’s history) but also on the social history of elites, including aristocracy.

Multicultural History

The Multicultural History segment supports research pursuing a view of the Czech lands as a meeting place of different cultural and ethnic groups and a space anchored firmly within Central Europe and the greater world. In the conceptual sense, the segment focuses on areas such as everydayness, intercultural transfer, conflicts and marginalization, globalization, and postcolonial perspectives of modern history. Emphasis is placed on the history of ethnic and cultural minorities in the Czech lands, namely Germans, Romani, and Jews. Research will examine mutual interactions, everydayness and leisure time, and the countryside and biophysical environment not only in relation to ethnicity but also to gender and the social environment.

Main Research Projects

• Formation and Development of Collective Identities in the Czech Lands
• Political, Social, and Economic Modernization of the Czech Lands
• Labour History
• Memory Studies
• Family Business History
• Historiographical Contexts

Department Publishing Projects

• The History of Everyday Life
• Programmes of Political Parties
• Family and Enterprise

Periodicals

• Modern History

Catalogues and Collections

• Collection of Written Memoirs
• Database of the History of the Everyday

Important Grants