Jan Vondráček

Dr. Jan Vondráček is a researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences and teaches history at Charles University in Prague. He studied history and political science at TU Darmstadt, earned an M.A. in East European Studies from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2011, and received his Ph.D. from TU Chemnitz in 2017 with an award-winning dissertation on everyday life under German occupation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (published by the Herder Institute in 2021). Building on this research, he has collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Digital Humanities projects and was recently awarded the Czech Academy of Sciences’ prestigious Lumina Quaeruntur research prize. He is currently leading the Connected History Project (CHiP), which develops computational approaches for integrating and analyzing archival sources across institutions. He is also focusing on the history of the defense of Czechoslovak democracy against the Nazi movement. His second monograph, Origins of Militant Democracy: The Shaping, Defense, and Perception of the First Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1938, will be published by transcript Verlag next year.