Doctoral Studies Centre

Doctoral Studies Centre

The basic task of the center is to support doctoral students in the development of their independent research activities and in the fulfillment of their study duties. Furthermore, the centers coordinate administrative activities associated with the operation of doctoral study programs and the involvement of PhD students in scientific and pedagogical activities. They can also advise PhD students on their grant projects.

Every September, a selection procedure is held, and three to four places are opened for full-time students.

RULES OF THE INTERNAL COMPETITION

2023/2024

Shpresonë Grulaj

Shpresonë is a PhD student in International Area Studies and a member of the Post Wars research center. Her research interest focuses on post war societies. With a background on Balkan and European studies, she is now specializing on post war social reconstruction in Kosovo, through women's perspective. Her study aims to scrutinize how women view the post war reconstruction processes after the last war in Kosovo, and how the war has shaped the experience of women, gender roles and other social concepts. By employing an interdisciplinary approach, she merges post wars, nationalism, gender studies and feminist studies, as different aspects to consider when defining social reconstruction in a post war country.


Zuzana Krulichová, M.A.

Zuzana Krulichová is a PhD student in the Area Studies programme at the Department of European Studies. She holds an MA in International Relations from Leiden University and an undergraduate degree in Area Studies from Charles University. In her doctoral dissertation, Zuzana examines how EU member states' narrate China and how the narratives have evolved since the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative. Generally, she is interested in discursive power and non-coercive influence in IR and the development of EU-China relations. Besides this, she has been a part of the Erasmus+ funded project e-NOTE (European Network on Teaching Excellence).


Zachary Lavengood

Zachary Lavengood is a fourth year Area Studies PhD student with the Department of North American Studies at IMS. His dissertation research focuses on designing a framework to analyze geopolitical flashpoints through case studies examining the Arctic and the South China Sea as zones of competition and conflict. Zachary's published research has focused on the evolving Arctic in the world-system, China's Arctic geopolitical ambitions, Korean public diplomacy, and foresight analysis on the South China Sea dispute. Additionally, he has presented research at conferences in Czechia, the United States, and Japan, as well as given guest lectures in Taiwan and the Philippines. 


Lamiya Panahova

Lamiya Panahova is a third year PhD student in Area Studies. Her doctoral research analyses the nationhood narratives in post-Soviet Azerbaijan through three different generations of school textbooks to find out the changing dynamics and patterns in the narratives. She is also a member of and participates actively in the work of the research centre “Small nation(-states) within/without empires and unions” at IMS. She recently completed her three-month research fellowship at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. Her broader research interests include identity and group-building, nation-building, and nationalism in the South Caucasus and wider post-Soviet space.

2022/2023

Mgr. Kateřina Fuksová

Kateřina Fuksová is in her third year of the Modern History programme at the Department of Russian and East European Studies. Thanks to her studies in Estonia, she has a strong background in Cultural Anthropology, Heritage Studies, Folkloristics, and Linguistics. Her research topics are related to the post-Soviet space with an emphasis on the Republic of Moldova. She focuses on memory and identity research and urban research (especially grassroots urban movements and neoliberal urban policies in post-socialist cities).


Mgr. Tereza Juhászová

Tereza is a PhD student in Modern History at the Department of Russian and East European Studies. She is currently in her second year of study and her research focuses on coexistence in linguistically mixed areas of Czechoslovakia after the end of World War II. Specifically, she is analyzing the dynamics of coexistence in a microhistorical study of the East Slovak small-town of Medzev, where the majority of the German-speaking population remained even after waves of post-war forced migration. Tereza is currently preparing a publication on societies in Central European borderlands with colleagues from the Universität Wien and Humboldt-Universität Berlin as part of the CENTRAL-Kolleg project.


Mgr. Roman Kolodii

Roman is a second-year student in the Area Studies PhD program at IMS. His dissertation focuses on the role of scientific and technological cooperation in Russo-Chinese strategic alignment after 1991. By surveying extensive Russian and Chinese-language sources, Roman is examining how key dual-use technologies transform the nature of Sino-Russian relations and their strategic impact on the international security landscape. His latest articles exploring the political and security dimension of technological innovation were published in American Intelligence Journal and Aretè International Journal of Philosophy, Human and Social Sciences.


Mgr. Rose Smith

Rose Smith is a fourth-year PhD student at the Department of Russian and East European Studies. Her doctoral research analyses the intersection of museal representations of the Communist past and identity construction on three levels, namely the city, the nation, and Europe, with a particular focus on museums in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw. Rose is currently pursuing a joint doctoral degree at both Charles University and Groningen University.

2021/2022

Mgr. Ladislav Beneš

Ladislav Beneš is a member of the Department of German and Austrian Studies. His dissertation research, under the supervision of Ondřej Matějka, PhD, focuses on material transfers across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Specifically, he illustrates them on the relations of Protestant churches in Czechoslovakia and West Germany during the period of normalization. Ladislav is also a partner of the Forschungsverbund SED-Staat der Freien Universität Berlin in researching German victims on the Iron Curtain.


Mgr. Eliška Ullrichová

Eliška is a fourth-year PhD student at the Department of European Studies. In her PhD research, Eliška on agenda-setting in the EU foreign policy. In 2018-2021 she was a junior researcher in the project Horizon 2020: Using science for/in diplomacy for addressing global challenges (S4D4C), and in 2019-2021 she held the SYLFF fellowship. In 2020, she was at the two-month research stay at the University of Padua under the leadership of professor Paolo Graziano.


 Mgr. Klára Žaloudková

Klára Žaloudková is a third-year PhD student at the Department of Russian and East European Studies. Her research interests lie in the post-socialist transition of Balkan countries, with a particular focus on the impacts of the transition on the consolidation of democratic values. In her current research, she looks at the issue of governance legitimacy in Bulgaria. Klára is currently pursuing a joint doctoral degree at both Charles University and Groningen University.

2020/2021

Mgr. Anežka Brožová

Anežka Brožová is a third-year Ph.D. student based at the Department of German and Austrian Studies. She focuses on the history of the Hlučín Region in Upper Silesia in the post-war period, emphasizing the history of everyday life. Her research interest includes social history and collective memory in Modern Central Europe. In the Doctoral Studies Centre, Anežka aims to collect primary sources for her research and analyze them. She is also preparing her first academic article. 


Mgr. Johana Kłusek

Johana Kłusek is a member of the Department of European Studies. Her doctoral research focuses on Czechoslovak Anglophilia during World War II and the Third Republic (supervisor: doc. Vít Smetana). In 2017 she received the Edvard Beneš Prize for Best Thesis in Modern History. As a SYLFF fellow she undertook an internship at Humboldt University in Berlin and cooperated on the project „London Moment“ led by Dr. Julia Eichenberg in 2019. Johana has taught a course „History from Below: Past and Present“ at Charles University and Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Currently, she also works as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London (tutor of „Frontiers of History“). A chapter, devoted to post-transformation ideological discourses of Václav Klaus, in a monograph „Where Does the 1989 Dwell? The Absolute Value of the Velvet Revolution“ (Karolinum 2020) represents her latest publication. She regularly comments on British politics for A2larm.


Mgr. Oleksandra Pekáčková Modelska

Alexandra Pekáčková Modelska is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, IMS, FSV and a junior fellow at the VITRI center for research of Violence, Trauma, and Justice. In her Ph.D. research, Alexandra focuses on the Holocaust in Southern Ukraine. Her scholarly interests go beyond the Holocaust studies and include history of antisemitism in Eastern Europe and memory politics.


Mgr. Jakub Šindelář

Jakub Šindelář is a third year Ph.D. student of Modern history. He focuses on the phenomenon of the reception of the World War I through computer games and interconnected paratexts - Let's Play videos. More widely, he focuses on representations of contemporary history of the Western Europe in audio-visual media. Next to his research and pedagogic activity, Jakub Šindelář works on the development of self-organization of Ph.D. students of the FSV UK and also serves as a vice-president of the Czech association of Ph.D. students.