On Wednesday, 25 March, the 63rd meeting of the CMS Fellows took place at the Academic Conference Centre.
The session was opened by Zuzana Hofmanová with a lecture on the possibilities of using archaeogenetics for historical research, in which she presented selected results from studies of early medieval burial sites.
In the subsequent part of the meeting, new Fellows were elected: Zdeněk Beran, David Eben, David Papajík, and Anna Tropia. Brief profiles are provided below:
Doc. Zdeněk Beran works at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Hradec Králové, at the Department of History. His research focuses primarily on the history of Hussitism and the George of Poděbrady period, as well as on urban history. He has devoted particular attention to the so-called Landfrieden movement, on which he published the monograph Landfrýdní hnutí v zemích České koruny: snahy o zajištění veřejného pořádku a bezpečnosti ve středověké společnosti..
Prof. David Eben, from the Institute of Musicology at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, is one of the leading specialists in medieval music, with a particular emphasis on Gregorian chant. Between 2008 and 2013, he also served as Professor of Gregorian Chant at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. Earlier this year, his monograph Filling in the Gap: The Post-Pentecost Series of Gospel Antiphons, co-authored with Štefánia Demská and Jan Bilwachs, was published.
Prof. David Papajík is Professor of History at the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University in Olomouc. His research focuses primarily on the history of the nobility, property relations in the Middle Ages, and regional history. In 2025, his book Hašek z Valdštejna. Žižkův soupeř, vojevůdce a diplomat was published.
Anna Tropia teaches at the Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Her research focuses on theories of cognition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, the Aristotelian tradition, Franciscan doctrines of intuition, and Scotism.
New corresponding fellows were also elected:
Pietro Delcorno is an associate professor at the University of Bologna. He focuses primarily on the study of medieval sermons and their role as tools for shaping identity as well as organizing and transmitting knowledge.
Monika Jakubek-Raczkowska works at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. In her research, she pays particular attention to the function of works of art and their role in liturgy, cult, and piety; in recent years, an important focus of her work has also been medieval manuscript heritage.
Reima Välimäki is a researcher at the University of Turku. His main research interests include the history of heresy, the inquisition, polemical literature and persecution, the Great Western Schism, as well as Finnish medievalism and historiography.
Dušan Zupka is an associate professor at Comenius University in Bratislava. He focuses primarily on political and symbolic communication in the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on the Central European context.