People
David Zbíral
Researcher
David is the director of CEDRR, 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.
Aleš Chalupa
Researcher
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 Glomb
Researcher
Tomáš is an Assistant Professor at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department for the Study of Religions and involved in the GEHIR and CEMRAM projects. He focuses on analyzing the factors involved in the spatio-temporal transmission of Hellenistic 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.
Tomáš Hampejs
Researcher
Tomáš is a programmer 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 the social and cognitive aspects of religion.
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.
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.
Vojtěch Kaše
Research Associate
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 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..
Jan Král
Student Researcher
Jan is a student member of the DISSINET team. He focuses on episcopal investigations against dissidents broadly defined as Lollards in late 14th- to 16th-century England. His special interest is the influence of gender, occupation, social status, and literacy on the structure of dissident communities from a network perspective.
Dalibor Papoušek
Researcher
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.
Zdeněk Pospíšil
Researcher
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.
Robert Shaw
Researcher
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.
Zdenko Vozár
Ph.D. Researcher
Zdenko is a medievalist and doctoral candidate 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 applies 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.
Viktor Zavřel
Researcher
Viktor is a researcher in the CEMRAM project and Ph.D. student of philosophy at Charles University and a Master student of ancient philology at Masaryk University. His research interests include on the one hand German philosophy and phenomenology, and on the other hand, classical Greek philosophy and religion. He translates from ancient Greek and tries to communicate philosophy to broader audiences.
