My name is Petr Sedlák (See Contact). I was born on 11th May 1980 in Žďár nad Sázavou, Czech Republic. After completing Elementary school (1986–1994), I continued my study at Christian lyceum (1994–1998) where I started to become interested in contemporary, especially Jewish history. In 1998 I entered Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno which I finished four years later, being awarded a MA in History and Geography (2002). There I began to deal with post-war history of Jewry in Bohemian (Czech) lands. The theme of my Diploma thesis was the recent situation of Jewish community in the Czech Republic. In the same year, 2002, I passed the entrance exams to postgraduate study at Faculty of Art, Masaryk University. There I concentrated on the study of Jewish holocaust survivors who were born here, returned or immigrated to Bohemian lands after the WWII. In particular I focused on the approach and attitude of the Czechoslovak State (consisting of the Czech lands and Slovakia) and the Czech majority toward the survivors. I finished my PhD study in January 2009 when my doctoral thesis was accepted.
(2010)
My interests are aimed at broadening of my PhD study and curent research in both contents and form
1) as I have collected and classified a great number of historical materials on interethnic situation within the Bohemian territory in the context of geo- and inner-political, demographic and social changes, and shifts in Czechoslovakia after the tragic events of WWII. These changes and shifts brought to its end the symbiosis of three ethnics living there (the Czechs, Germans and Jews).
2) as I am interested in finding a perspective to analyze and interpret facts from the historical materials. This perspective should reflect the above mentioned interethnic collapse as a subjective process of perception of social reality as it was seen by ordinary people of all three Bohemian lands´ tribes according to their different practical and ideological needs.
My current research interests and the application for the Jackman Humanities Institute postdoctoral fellowship have given me the idea to create the conception of a project called “The Morning of 5th March 1947 in Varnsdorf: on people´s everyday stability during the interethnic collapse of the Bohemian society”. The long title refers to the social-historic reality of my current research and the anthropological perspective through which I see it: a reality perceived and adapted by people in their everyday lives as an image, according to their drive for psychic congruence and stability. The introductory, popularizing title of the project “The Morning of 5th March 1947 in Varnsdorf” illustrates my ambition to convey the interpretation off the past in a historically unorthodox and micro-historical way. I intend to materialize the project in three book-length volumes, each corresponding to the different perspectives -- resulting from the confrontation -- of the three ethnic parts of the Bohemian society in those days: of the Czech, Jews and Germans.
