Eva Jarosova

Eva Jarošová

Eva Jarošová, PhD candidate in History, Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic

 

As a young history student at the Charles University in Prague, I was fascinated by the phenomena of plague epidemics. Doing my undergraduate research in this area, I discovered a fascinating world of macabre art. Funeral culture and attitudes towards death in the early-modern period thus became a topic for my master thesis. During my graduate studies, I spent one very inspirational year at the University of Helsinki in Finland as an exchange student. Thanks to this experience I was also able to extend my research to a comparative part at a certain point. After graduating I applied to the Institute of the Czech history at Charles University for the doctoral programme. Inspired by the previous research, I decided to focus on a specific part of the funeral culture, to the material funeral culture of the early-modern period. I find this topic rather illuminating than sad, balancing somewhere at borders of anthropology, history, history of art, religious studies and much more. To correctly use all these approaches in the research of confessionally divided society of the Bohemia before the battle of White mountain and to create a plastic picture of this time period is really challenging. Also, I do believe there is a lot to learn from our ancestors, especially in a field that was so tobooized in a modern society.

My acquaintance of the funeral culture I try to share and discuss with the domestic audience in form of conferences, public lectures and articles (we are just preparing a special volume of HOP journal summoning the contributions from our panel Totenkultur realized with my colleague Helena Chalupová in 2017 during the 11th Congress of the Czech historians). My knowledge of the early modern period I try to hand to my students in preparatory courses for the university as well as to that ones already at the university. A lot of my students are from all around the world since I do guarantee a course on Czech history for the exchange students at the Charles University in Prague.

Besides this, a lot of my time is dedicated to my hobby which is a historical reenactment of 15th, 16th and the first half of 17th century. I find this as a certain way to supplement the traditional and "boring" scholar point of view on history.
I also enjoy calm activities such as reading, writing, doing fire shows, and recently I became a member of the University of Alberta synchronized swimming team.

Contact

E-mail: jarosova@ualberta.ca
Telephone: 780-492-6390
Address:
University of Alberta
Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies
300-F
Arts & Convocation Hall
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E6