Research themes and members

A fuller institutional profile for Josefína Filip will be published here as part of the next profile update.

Hana Horáková is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc. She holds a habilitation degree in Social Anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague (2012). She holds a PhD in African Studies from the Institute of the Near East and Africa, Charles University (2005). She was President of the Czech Association of African Studies between 2013 and January 2019.

Her research activities include anthropology of tourism and rural studies, and anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa focusing on politics of identity and nationalism. She has conducted fieldwork in South Africa, exploring culture in the making and the nation-building process in post-apartheid South Africa. Her recent research focuses on cultural tourism in Southern Africa and memory politics in Namibia.

She has published on aspects of the above research topics in international journals and has written and/or edited more than eight books within African Studies and Social Anthropology.

He was born on March 23, 1935. He completed his university studies in General History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, in 1960, and his postgraduate studies in African History at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in 1965.

His research focuses primarily on the modern history and culture of Southern African countries including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. He has published numerous monographs, scholarly articles and popular science pieces on African issues.

Mgr. Kateřina Mildnerová, Ph.D., is a Czech Africanist and social and cultural anthropologist living in Hranice na Moravě. Since 2015, she has been working at the Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural Anthropology at Palacký University in Olomouc. Since 2019, she has been the chairperson of the Czech Association of African Studies. During her lifetime, she has conducted dozens of field research projects in Zambia, Benin and Namibia and lectured at several universities in Africa and Europe. She specializes in the anthropology of religion and medical anthropology. Her long-standing research interests include issues of magic, witchcraft, traditional healing and albinism in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as African art, collective identity and migrants' conceptions of home. She is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and five monographs of her own: My Neighbour is a Witch (2011), Drinking Fetishes: Religion and Art in Benin (2012), From Where Does the Bad Wind Blow (2015), and Black Falcons. The Moved Fates of Namibian Children Raised in Czechoslovakia (2020) and Namibian Czechs (2020). She is the co-author of the successful documentary film Black Czechs (2022) and the founder of the non-profit organization Spolek na podporu Namibian Czechs. She is currently working on Born Different, a project about living with albinism in Africa, together with Mozambican photographer Antonio Cossa.

A fuller institutional profile for Linda Piknerová will be published here as part of the next profile update.

Jan Prouza earned his master's degree in Political Science – African Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Hradec Králové, and his doctoral degree in International Relations and European Studies at the Institute of International Relations and the Metropolitan University Prague.

Since 2009, he has been working as an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts, UHK, where he engages in teaching and research focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly its western regions. His primary research interests include domestic conflicts, instability, and African political systems in general.

Nicola Raúl has a Ph.D. in Migration Studies from the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University in Olomouc. She holds degrees in French Philology and Cultural Anthropology, also from the Faculty of Arts at Palacký University.

From the beginning of her academic career, her work has focused on connecting cultural and social aspects of a globalized world. Her research is centered on sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Angola, exploring topics such as identity, power, and structural racism, and their impact on migration dynamics and social inequalities.

Mgr. et Mgr. Vilém Řehák, Ph.D., graduated in African Studies and Political Science from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University and in International Relations from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University.

He specializes in contemporary political and economic developments in Africa and its position in international relations and the global economy. He currently works as an analyst at the Research Center of the Association for International Affairs (AMO) with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Mgr. Alžběta Šváblová, PhD, teaches at the University of Hradec Králové and the University of Vienna, focusing on topics related to conflict and peace, gender, and West Africa. She is also involved in academic writing, writing coaching, and conducts educational seminars in this field.

Silvester Trnovec is a historian and Africanist working at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. His research focuses on the transformation of African societies in West and North Africa under the conditions of European colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

He also conducts research on the historical relations and contacts between the African continent and the territory of present-day Slovakia.

Klára Trsková studied Portuguese Studies and Film Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, and the Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU. In 2024, she completed her doctoral studies in Romance Literatures at Charles University.

In addition to African literature written in Portuguese, she also focuses on Mozambican, Angolan, Cape Verdean, and Guinean-Bissauan cinema. She organizes the annual AfroFilmes film showcase at the Ponrepo Cinema in collaboration with the Portuguese Center – IC.

Zuzana Uhde specializes in critical social theory, feminist theory, and critical migration and border studies. Her current research focuses on interdisciplinary analyses of the political economy of transnational migration, borders, transnational social reproduction, and the commodification of care, with regional expertise centered on Central Europe and East Africa.

She is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and an external collaborator with the School of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University.

A fuller institutional profile for Jan Záhořík will be published here as part of the next profile update.

A fuller institutional profile for Kateřina Ženková Rudincová will be published here as part of the next profile update.