Dr Matej Ivančík; Visiting Fellowship 2022/23
I currently work at the Department of General History at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava. My research covers civil society, nationalism and intellectual and political history in the late socialist and post-socialist (Czecho-)Slovakia. I have recently cooperated on the project A Game-Changing Year: Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Europe where I focused on both late socialist and post-socialist narratives of remembrance. I was a visiting fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena. Before, I carried out research internships at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and at the Open Society Archives in Budapest.
The main attempt of my research tackles the intellectual history of the emerging forms of civil society, national politics, neoliberalism and democracy in Slovakia within a broader frame of Czecho-Slovakia and Central Europe respectively.
Visiting Fellowship June-August 2022
My motivation for the research stay at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana was sparked by a cooperation that has already been carried out at various levels. These include my participation at the conference on European parliamentary history co-organised by the institute’s Jure Gašparić and Tjaša Konovšek in 2020, my research cooperation with two members of the institute, Tjaša Konovšek and Isidora Grubački, and, most recently an international conference and workshop Intellectual History in Transition, hosted by the institute and co-organised by Isidora Grubački and Marko Zajc in 2021. In particular, the most recent cooperation in the field of intellectual history of the post-socialist period has been a major influence on my scholarly ambitions.
It is within this frame where the role of the Ljubljana Institute of Contemporary History has provided me a vital support and introduced me to further possibilities of conducting relevant research applicable in international academic platforms. At the same time, with a vision of both developing and promoting future cooperation, the institute is becoming an international research hub for the study of contemporary history. The main objectives of my stay in Ljubljana aim at further development of my research on post-socialist history of democracy in East Central Europe, in cooperation with Tjaša Konovšek and other colleagues from the institute, as well as establishing a more solid basis for further institutional cooperation.
Relevant publications
IVANČÍK, Matej, From Democrats to Liberals. The Ambiguous Origins of Liberals and Civil Society in Slovakia after 1989. In: Soudobé dějiny, 2021, 28, Vol. 3, pp. 706-724.
IVANČÍK, Matej, “State of Grace”. A Probe into Understanding Democratic Trust and Legitimacy through the Eyes of the Public Against Violence. In: Forum Historiae, 2021, 15, Vol. 2, pp. 123-138.
