Dr Michal Kopecek

Head of the Department of Ideas and Concepts at the Institute for Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; since October 2016, co-director of Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. His research interests include comparative modern intellectual history of East Central Europe, nationalism studies, history of state socialism and communism and the study of transition and democratization processes. Among others he is author of a monograph The Quest for the Revolution’s Lost Meaning. Origins of the Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe 1953-1960 (in Czech language 2009, forthcoming in English) and co-author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century', Oxford University Press 2016. He is co-editor of Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe After 1989. Budapest – New York: CEU Press, 2015, of the five-volume series Bolshevism, Communism and Radical Socialism in Czechoslovakia (in Czech, Prague) and the four-volume Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Text and Commentaries (in English, Budapest-New York). Currently he is working on his book project Dissident Legacy in Post-Socialism focusing on Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.