Welcome!

I am a historian and political scholar exploring how ideologies take root, evolve, and endure across successive regimes. My work sits at the intersection of history, political science, and the study of memory – tracing how structural forces and individual choices interact in moments of political upheaval, and what traces those interactions leave behind.

I am Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, where I teach courses on antisemitism, race in global politics, and the politics of regret. I am currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, developing my next book project.

My primary expertise lies in antisemitism, nationalism, the Holocaust and its aftermath. I take an integrated approach in my writing, tracing how attitudes, ideologies, and emotions develop, connect, and persist across time and across regime changes.

My current research is built around what I call the ambiguity paradigm – an account of how modern states structurally produced subjects whose loyalties, motivations, and moral positions were genuinely ambiguous, and why that ambiguity was not a failure of the system but a resource it depended on. The paradigm explains how mid-level actors of fascism – teachers, clergy, administrators, professionals – navigated successive political orders, reinventing themselves without ever fully breaking with what came before. My new project traces this mechanism across East-Central Europe at comparative scale, asking what it tells us about complicity, survival, and the long afterlife of autocracies.

My latest book, Christian Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Making of the Holocaust in Slovakia, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. It received the Bedřich Hrozný Prize from Charles University in 2026, the university’s most prestigious research award, given across all disciplines. The Slovak edition became an instant bestseller, was released as an audiobook, and was named Book of the Month by Kulturný život, the Slovak national cultural weekly of record.

My work has appeared in Nations & Nationalism, Contemporary European History, Journal of Genocide Research, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and East European Politics & Societies.

I have served as principal investigator or senior researcher in projects supported by all major national and European funding schemes, and am currently a senior scholar in Beyond Security, the largest EU-funded research project in Czechia.

Beyond my research, I contribute regularly to public debate on antisemitism, democratic backsliding, and the uses and misuses of historical memory in Central Europe.