People
Tomáš Glomb
Tomáš is the director of CEDRR and Assistant Professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions and is involved in the GEHIR and CEMRAM projects. He focuses on analyzing the factors involved in the spatio-temporal transmission of ancient religions across the Mediterranean, such as politics and trade. 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.
Aleš Chalupa
Aleš is an Assistant Professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions and principal investigator of the GEHIR project. His research interests include the macrohistorical study of the ancient Mediterranean and Cognitive Historiography. He is also interested in the application of formalizing modeling to research into the Roman Cult of Mithras and its early transmission in the Roman Empire, especially in connection with Roman army infrastructure.
Stanislaw Banach
Stanislaw (MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, 2019) is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of revolt and violent conflict across the towns of Silesia, Poland, and Prussia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His interest in urban history carries over to DISSINET, where he concentrates on the inquisitions of Waldensians in Fribourg (1399, 1430) and Strasbourg (1400-1401).
Zoltán Brys
Zoltan (currently finishing his PhD in Sociology) is a computational social researcher. Before joining DISSINET he was teaching data analysis and social psychology and also doing research in these fields at Semmelweis University, Hungary. He received the Róbert Kolossváry Memorial Prize in 2021. Methodologically, he uses both traditional frequentist methods and modern techniques such as machine learning and network analysis. In the DISSINET project he focuses on social network analysis.
Tomáš Hampejs
Tomáš is a researcher and computational social and cognitive science enthusiast. He devises and maintains the digital infrastructure for data collection in the DISSINET and GEHIR projects and designs various tools for data transformation. He is interested in social scientific theory, the formalized modelling of complex phenomena, and bridging religion's social and cognitive aspects.
Petr Hanák
Petr is a programmer with a background in engineering, having contributed to tram predevelopment at ŠKODA transportation and jet trainer Albatros at Aero Vodochody. He currently leads the development of the InkVisitor research environment including the DISSINET research database and also focuses on building user interface for InkVisitor.
Gideon Kotzé
Gideon is a researcher and developer with a special interest in text corpora, treebanks, machine translation, digitization, and wordnets. Before joining DISSINET, he worked on a web application for geographical terminology and a mobile application for place names in English and South African Sign Language. In the DISSINET project, he works on the representation and data storage of a corpus of inquisitorial records, while applying text mining and other natural language processing techniques for the extraction of useful information for visualization and research.
Tereza Menšíková
Jolana Navrátilová
Jolana (MA in Sociology and English language and literature from Masaryk University, 1998) is the managing assistant of the DISSINET project. She has worked in the university international office and PR department, and participated in several NGO projects (including EU grant-funded projects). She also translates from English (social science texts, fiction – YA sci-fi, fantasy) and enjoys sci-fi, medieval history and walks.
Dalibor Papoušek
Dalibor is an Assistant Professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions and a member of the GEHIR team. His research aims at reconsidering the influence of Jewish heritage in the spread of early Christianity across the Mediterranean through the use of mathematical modelling.
Robert Shaw
Robert is a historian and the deputy PI of the DISSINET project. His research, focused on Languedoc, systematically analyses the factors affecting the sentencing of dissidents, including social interactions and relationships. He is also interested in the path dependencies of the narratives found in inquisition records. His previous research has focused on the religious networks forged by late medieval monastic reform, both between cloisters and beyond them.
Katalin Suba
Katalin (MA in Medieval Art History from Eötvös Loránd University, 2018) is currently finishing her PhD in art history on unique 11th-century stone ornamentation found in Cistercian abbeys. Before joining DISSINET, she was involved in research focusing on the comparative analysis of medieval rituals. Within DISSINET, she specializes in medieval textual sources and studies the rituals of dissident religious communities using quantitative methods.
David Zbíral
David is the principal investigator of DISSINET, and an Associate Professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions. He focuses on inquisitorial records from Languedoc and Lombardy (1230s-1320s) to make sense of the situational emergence, transmission, and functioning of rituals, beliefs, and organizational forms of dissident religious cultures. He is also interested in the spatial patterns of dissent, such as the spatial distribution of rituals and the mobility of dissident ministers, and in the discursive qualities of deposition narratives.
Ph.D. and M.A. students
Anestis Karasaridis
Ph.D. Researcher
Anestis is a doctoral candidate at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions. In his Ph.D. research on The Dynamics of the Spread of Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries CE: A System Dynamics Model of the Interaction between Christian and Pagan Populations in the Roman Empire during the Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian, he evaluates the role of epidemics in the growth of the early Christian population.
Michal Saidl
Ph.D. Researcher
Michal is a Ph.D. student at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions, where he researches the relationship between religions and gaming culture. He is particularly interested in single-player story-driven video games in which players can explore the game’s world and be challenged by a different variety of obstacles and puzzles. His specialization in this area is exploring the subjective player experience and how it relates to religiosity.
Katia Riccardo
Ph.D. Researcher
Katia joined the DISSINET project as a Ph.D. candidate in the study of religions at Masaryk University. Her previous research has focused on the political and religious history of the early Middle Ages, with a particular focus on theological debates in the Carolingian period. Within the DISSINET project she studies the beliefs and practices of Cathars and Apostles as they emerge from the trial interactions contained in the inquisitorial register of Bologna (1291-1310). With the employment of computational techniques such as CTA and SNA, she aims to analyse the depositions of the people involved and the discursive patterns of their testimonies, focusing on the declarations of their beliefs as well as reporting on other people related to their social network.
Ondřej Homolka
Ph.D. Researcher
Ondřej is a doctoral candidate at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions. In his Ph.D. research on Continuity and Discontinuity of the Cults of Isis and Mary: A Spatial Analysis of the Late Antique Evidence, he tests the classical thesis about the “replacement” of the cult of Isis by the cult of Mary using methods of spatial analysis.
Sebastian Kheml
Ph.D. Researcher
Sebastian is a Ph.D. student at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department of the Study of Religions, and Department of Ancient History. In his academic research, Sebastian focuses on the influence of parasitic organisms on the ancient Mediterranean world. He is particularly interested in how people in antiquity understood, perceived, and conceptualized these organisms and how they responded to parasites as a society (in terms of social tools, innovations, and religion).
Lenka Kadlečková
M.A. Researcher
Lenka is pursuing her M.A. degree at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions. Her research focuses on the goddess Isis on Roman imperial coinage, examining the transformations of her iconography and its role in imperial visual communication and propaganda. She combines qualitative iconographic analysis with digital and quantitative approaches, using numismatic databases (OCRE, RPC) to identify spatial and temporal patterns in the representation of Isis across the Roman Empire. More broadly, she is interested in the intersection of religion, power, and material culture in the ancient Mediterranean world, particularly in the reception of Egyptian religious elements within the Roman context.
Jana Kendíková
M.A. Researcher
Jana Kendíková is an MA student in Religious Studies at Masaryk University. In her M.A. thesis, she focuses on the study of prodigies (prodigia) in Roman culture, integrating literary, historical, and environmental datasets to examine the relationship between extraordinary phenomena, natural disasters, and political transformations. Her research reflects a strong interest in interdisciplinary and data-driven approaches to the study of religion and ancient societies.
Graduates
Petra Houserová
M.A. Graduate
Petra got her M.A. degree at Masaryk University, at the Department for the Study of Religions. Her research focused on the cult of Magna Mater and Attis in the ancient Roman Empire, with an emphasis on the variabilities in the spatial spread of this cult throughout the Empire. Petra primarily analyzed inscriptions and visual representations sourced from comprehensive databases.
Zdenko Vozár
Ph.D. Graduate
Zdenko is a medievalist and P.h.D. graduate at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions. In his Ph.D. research on The Alchemical Mind: Towards a Digital Archaeology of the Transmission of Symbolic Representations of Knowledge, he applied various computational techniques to explore digitized old prints of medieval and early modern alchemical texts, identify their broader patterns, and analyze intertextual links within the alchemical tradition.
Research associates
Zdeněk Pospíšil
Zdeněk is a Professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics and Statistics and a member of the GEHIR team. He tries to adapt mathematical models from population dynamics, biological evolution, and epidemiology in order to shed light on the transmission and competition of cultural forms in history.
Zdeněk Stachoň
Zdeněk Stachoň is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, Faculty of Science. His research encompasses the cognitive aspects of cartographic visualization, thematic cartography, old map information mining and cartographic semiotics.
In his collaborations with CEDRR, he is focused on historical data spatial analysis and spatiotemporal cartographic visualization. His main research interest is the cartographic representation of (un)certainty aspects of generated models.
Vojtěch Kaše
Vojtěch is a social scientist employing various computational tools to gain a better understanding of the long-term dynamics of human societies. His historical expertise is the Ancient Mediterranean and Early Christianity. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the SDAM project at Aarhus University, Denmark, and an Assistant Professor at the University of West Bohemia, Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy. As a former graduate of the Department for the Study of Religions and a founding member of the GEHIR project, he collaborates closely with CEDRR as a Research Associate and is part of CEMRAM project.
