Martin Babička, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Biography

Martin Babička is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. His research interests include the history of neoliberalism, environmental history, and the history of late socialism and postsocialist transformation in East-Central Europe. In Prague, he is currently a member of the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies, where he studies postsocialist transformation in Czechia and Slovakia from an intellectual and cultural history perspective. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where his dissertation explored how environmental discourses intersected with changing attitudes towards a technocratic form of governance between state socialism and neoliberal transformation. He has been a visiting fellow at Sciences Po, Paris, and at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Potsdam.

As a visiting fellow, Martin will work on his new project on the crisis of expertise and the rise of esotericism in the context of a liberal critique of socialist rationalism in the 1990s. As part of his stay, he will present a case study of astrology in the postsocialist media, its reception by liberal intellectuals, and the reactions of the scientific community. The broader aim of the fellowship is to strengthen links with the Institute’s scholars, particularly experts in intellectual and environmental history, and to explore future research collaboration.

Visiting Fellowship 3.10. – 1.11. 2024

List of publications

‘Discourses of Moral and Ecological Crisis in Czech Postsocialist Transformation’ in Trencsényi, B., Balikić, L., Blagojević, U., & Grubački, I. (eds.), East Central European Crisis Discourses in the Twentieth Century: A Never-Ending Story?. Routledge (2024).

‘A “Right to Sadness”: Late Socialist Environmentalism between Technocracy and Romanticism and the Czech Nature Writer Jaromír Tomeček.’ Kontradikce 6, no. 2 (2023): 67–90.

‘“The future is in your hands”: temporality and the neoliberal self in the Czech voucher privatization.’ Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 30, no. 1 (2022): 83-99.