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.

Tomáš Glomb

Tomáš Glomb is the director of the Centre for the Digital Research of Religion at the Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Study of Religions at MUNI in 2018. In 2020-2022, he worked as a postdoctoral Marie-Sklodowska Fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway on the project “Favorable Conditions of the Spread of the Cult of Asclepius across the Transportation Network of the Roman Mediterranean: A Quantitative Evaluation”. Dr. Glomb focuses on analyzing the factors involved in the spatio-temporal transmission of ancient religions across the Mediterranean by formal methods such as network and spatial analysis. His main interest in this research domain is the dynamics of the spread of Egyptian cults under the rule of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the cultural transmission of Roman worship.

Dr. Glomb invites postdocs interested in quantitative approaches to religious phenomena of the past on varying scales of analysis (site, regional, or macro level). Together with other experts from the Centre for the Digital Research of Religion, he is able to provide supervision and guidance to the postdoc in the context of Digital Humanities methods, especially GIS analytical tools, quantitative textual analysis, or network analysis.

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.

Petra Mutlová

Petra Mutlová is a classical philologist interested in medieval Latin language and literature as well as late medieval history. She leads an international research group based at the Department of Classical Studies that prepares critical editions of various medieval Latin sources, focusing on the works of Jan Hus, a seminal figure of the Czech Reformation, and John of Capestrano, a famous Franciscan preacher of Italian origin. The outstanding international outreach of this research is guaranteed by the appearance of the critical editions in a special series of the Corpus Christianorum of the Brepols publishers.

In her research, Petra Mutlová studies the spread and dissemination of ideas in medieval Latin texts, particularly emphasizing manuscript studies and textual criticism in the broadest context of medieval written culture. She is interested in the concept of authorship and anonymity in medieval literature, in the academic life and literary production at medieval universities, and last but not least, in the possibilities of quantitative analyses of medieval texts.

Petra Mutlová invites early career researchers interested in medieval texts and manuscripts. She is happy to supervise projects on making accessible and contextualizing the wealth of information these intriguing sources contain on the life of pre-modern societies.

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.

Paolo Divizia

Paolo Divizia is Associate professor of Textual Criticism (Filologia italiana), History of Italian Language and History of Italian Literature. He is also member of the Doctoral Teaching Board in the PhD programme in Humanities at the University of Ferrara. He studied in Italy (MA at the University of Turin, PhD at the University of Parma) and has been cooperating with quite a few international research projects (such as the DiVo. Dizionario dei Volgarizzamenti, OVI Institute in Florence; Alfonso de Cartagena. Obras Completas, IEMYR, Universidad de Salamanca; Centro di Ricerca di Ecdotica e Analisi dei Testi letterari, Università di Urbino; At the Crossroads of Memories: Art and Representation in 14th-century Venice, MU in Brno). In 2014 he founded the “Seminario permanente di Filologia italiana e romanza” in Brno.

Divizia’s broad research interests focus on textual criticism, medieval vernacular translations from Latin to Italian or between Romance vernacular languages, moral treatises and rethoric (Brunetto Latini, Bono Giamboni, Disticha Catonis, sayings of philosophers), multi-text manuscripts, also from a theoretical point of view, within a framework which includes both a textual and material approach, both a synchronic and diachronic approach (a topic about which he is ofted invited to give lectures and seminars).

Associate prof. Paolo Divizia invites early career post-doc researchers interested in medieval vernacular texts and manuscripts, with a focus on textual transmission, vernacular translations from Latin to and between Romance vernacular languages (such as Italian, French, Catalan, Castilian), multi-text manuscripts, interdisciplinary research, philological theory. He will be happy to supervise projects involving any of such study fields. Post-doc researchers may benefit from his rich and long-standing experience in the field of manuscripts and textual studies. Any research projects involving texts and transmission in the area of medieval Romance languages and literatures, texts transmitted by more than a witness, multitext manuscripts to be studied on their own or in connection with other multi-text manuscripts bearing at least partly the same works, are welcome.