Postdoc at FF MU

Martin Lang

Dr. Lang’s work lies at the intersection between the humanities and the cognitive and behavioral sciences, combining laboratory experiments with field studies to investigate how the human mind creates cultural niches and functions in them. He pursues a combination of state-of-the-art theories on the human mind with cutting-edge wearable technology to answer long-standing questions in the study of human culture. For example, Dr. Lang led a team systematically investigating a hypothesis that religious ritual helps alleviate anxiety. He also led several studies investigating the effects of dance and music on coordination, cooperation, and social bonding. Dr. Lang’s latest theoretical work focused on the evolution of ritual behavior as a platform for communicating a commitment to joint action using costly signals. Adding experimental evidence to this theoretical model, he led a registered report on the effectiveness of costly signaling, showing that such signals help reliably assort cooperators and that this function intensifies with pressures on cooperation such as intergroup conflict. Dr. Lang is currently a PI on a project that investigates cognitive computations facilitating such cooperative communication.

Dr. Lang is looking for postdocs with an interest in human cooperation and, specifically, the role religious beliefs and behaviors play in facilitating cooperation. He is open to tackling this question from various disciplinary angles, including behavioral sciences, cognitive science and neuroscience, economics, and evolutionary sciences. He offers access to facilities for experimental research, including portable devices such as fNIRS or eye-tracking at HUME Lab and interdisciplinary teamwork at LEVYNA.

Ivan Foletti

Ivan Foletti is a Full Professor of Art History with international scholarly background (PhD title from the University of Lausanne, numerous fellowships and collaborations across Europe and in the US) and the head of the Centre for Early Medieval Studies at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, an interdisciplinary research group with very dynamic development over the past 10 years. His broad research interests cover the history and historiography of art history and the visual and material cultures spreading across Central Europe, the Mediterranean, and the South Caucasus. Using art historical methods as well as state-of-the-art and experimental technologies, his research team challenges established narratives in the field, refocusing the experience of pre-modern art on the body in interaction with man-made, natural, and performative environments. The historiographical axis of his research focuses especially on deconstructing imperialistic, nationalistic, and colonial perspectives to reveal the manipulative uses of the medieval past in modern and contemporary societies. Professor Foletti is the editor-in-chief of the internationally renowned journal Convivium, indexed in WoS and Scopus, and director of several book series. He was awarded with numerous national and international projects, currently coordinating a H2020 MSCA-RISE project (www.conques.eu) and supervising a MSCA-IF project.

Professor Foletti invites post-doc fellows whose research tackles any aspects of the reception of pre-modern cultures and their role in shaping the present. MSCA candidates may benefit from his rich experience with supervision and coordination of interdisciplinary research, a broad network of international cooperations, and his extensive knowledge of the current trends in the field.

Wei-lun Lu

Wei-lun Lu (Habilitated in general and diachronic linguistics at Masaryk University, 2023; Ph.D. in linguistics at National Taiwan University, 2011) is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Asian Studies of Masaryk University. He has research interests in cognitive-oriented contrastive analysis, emphasizing the cultural, stylistic, and poetic ramifications of the linguistic tool. He has published in Cognitive Linguistics, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Metaphor and Symbol, and Discourse and Society. Currently, Wei-lun serves as the Review Editor of Review of Cognitive Linguistics and is on the editorial board of International Journal of Language and Culture (John Benjamins), Cognitive Linguistic Studies (John Benjamins), Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education (Springer), Studia Orientalia Slovaca (Comenius University Press, Slovakia), and Acta Linguistica Asiatica (University of Ljubljana Press, Slovenia).

Wei-lun welcomes early career researchers to work with him in the field of cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics or anthropological linguistics.

Zuzana Fonioková

Zuzana Fonioková is based at the Department of Czech Literature. However, her research interests go beyond Czech literature. Her recent project combines narrative theory, life writing studies, and narrative psychology to analyse the narrative strategies of self-representation in different genres, modes, and media, including autofiction and autobiographical comics. Currently, she is especially interested in the ways life writing engages with hegemonic discourses, cultural narratives, and dominant storytelling templates for certain experiences. Her previous project focused on unreliable narration (her book Kazuo Ishiguro and Max Frisch: Bending Facts in Unreliable and Unnatural Narration was published in 2015).

Zuzana Fonioková invites postdocs with the following research interests: narrative theory; life writing; narrative, cognitive, cultural, and discursive psychology; fictionality and factuality; autofiction; autobiographical comics; identity construction in intermedial contexts; contemporary fiction.

Jiří Zounek

Jiří Zounek works as an Associate Professor at the Department of Educational Sciences at the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University (Czech Republic). For a long time, he has been focusing on the history of Czech pedagogy and school systems in the twentieth century and, simultaneously, on the use of digital technologies in education. He has been the grantee or a project partner in several research and development projects for the past ten years.

Jiri uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to research digital technologies (including AI) in education. He focuses on contemporary youth learning with digital technologies in different settings (school, family, online) and contexts. It also focuses on teachers' work with digital technologies, as well as on adult life and work in the era of digital technologies and AI.

In his research on the history of education, he uses, among other things, the oral history method to capture the unique experience and memory of teachers or principals in socialist and post-socialist primary schools.

He has (co-)authored books about ICT in primary schools, teachers and technology, mobile technologies in education, and e-learning. He is the principal author of Life and Learning of Digital Teens. Adolescents and Digital Technology in the Czech Republic (Springer, 2022) or (Post)Socialist Transformation of Primary Schools: Processes, Stories and Challenges in the Czech Republic (Springer, 2024). In recent years, he has published studies in Computers & Education, Computers in Human Behavior or Paedagogica Historica.

Jiří Zounek will be happy to collaborate with postdoctoral colleagues on topics that address the lives and learning of youth and adults in the digital era. In our joint research, we will look for new or innovative methods to best recognize, describe, explain and understand learning processes in the 21st century.

Jiří Zounek also offers to collaborate on research on schools, schooling or pedagogy in Central Europe's second half of the 20th century. This is an interesting opportunity for postdoctoral researchers to explore these topics directly in a country with a communist past in education. Interdisciplinary approaches or international comparisons are welcome in both research topics.