People

Jiří Kocián is a deputy head of the Department of Russian and Eastern European Studies, the head of the Center for Digital Humanities Integration at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences and senior coordinator of the Malach Center for Visual History at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, both at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic (CUNI). In his research, while focusing on the area of Central and Southeast Europe, he deals with transitions to democracy, issues of populism and democratic backsliding, transnational history, (non-)national identities, the history of Jews in and the Holocaust with special attention to oral history, and the implementation of DH methods in SSH.

With his colleagues from both of his home faculties, he has recently designed and launched an interdisciplinary Certified study program in Digital Humanities for undergraduate and graduate students. In recent years, he has contributed to multiple international research projects such as EC HORIZONs MEMORISE "Virtualisation and Multimodal Exploration of Heritage on Nazi Persecution" (2022-on), TWIN4DEM "Strengthening Democratic Resilience through Digital Twins" (from 2025), POPREBEL "Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe: neo-traditionalism and neo-feudalism" (2019-2022) and DEMOS "Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe" (2019-2022), EC-funded "Manifestations of Antisemitism in the Visegrád Countries" (2018-2022) or CUNI-funded PRIMUS "The Past is Present: The Use and Misuse of Traumatic Historical Events in Foreign Policy" (2021-on).