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.
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.
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.
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.
Davor Salihović
Davor is a medievalist with a particular interest in the interplay between social and spatial factors in the genesis and maintenance of institutions and ideas, as well as in source editing, and quantitative history. While he previously investigated the political and spatial history of the late-medieval Hungarian-Ottoman frontier, within DISSINET he primarily focuses on the spatial patterns of the networks of dissent in the region of Piedmont and its immediate surroundings in the fourteenth century. By combining the methods of Social Network Analysis and Historical GIS, he hopes to shed light on the geographical influences that shaped these networks and governed the spread of dissident thought.
Robert Shaw
Robert is a historian whose research within DISSINET uses network and geographical analysis to unlock patterns of punishment and resistance in Occitan communities undergoing inquisition. He is particularly interested in how these interactions affected social connections and perceptions over time. His previous research has focused on the religious networks forged by late medieval monastic reform, both between cloisters and beyond them.
Kaarel Sikk
Kaarel is a data / software engineer who has turned to research. Before joining DISSINET he was studying archaeological data science focusing on spatial data. His interests include spatial statistics, exploratory data analysis, complex adaptive systems, and emergence in the context of historical social processes. In his doctoral work, he uses various modelling techniques to study archaeological settlement pattern formation processes as self-organising complex systems. In the DISSINET project, he focuses on geospatial data analysis, cartography, geographical application development, as well as spatial statistics and modelling.
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 combines the close reading of medieval inquisitorial records and the analytical techniques of social network analysis in order to explore the situational emergence and transmission of institutions in social interaction, such as rituals, norms, and organizational forms. He is also interested in spatial patterns of dissent, such as the spatial distribution of rituals and the mobility of dissident ministers.
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.
Tereza Menšíková
Ph.D. Researcher
Tereza is a Ph.D. candidate in the study of religions at Masaryk University and a sociologist at the Centre for Research on Ageing (CERA). In her dissertation and IGA research project Challenging Marginalisation Online: The Case of Dalit Movement Network Through Blog and News Platforms, she explores the social and discursive patterns of Indian Dalit online activism through activist online production on blog and news platforms. By adopting the methods of computational text analysis (unsupervised machine learning models) and social network analysis, her research aims to understand the role of religious and secular motives in socio-political mobilization.
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.
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.
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).
Petra Houserová
M.A. Researcher
Petra is currently pursuing her M.A. degree at Masaryk University, at the Department for the Study of Religions. Her research focuses 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 analyzes inscriptions and visual representations sourced from comprehensive databases.
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.
