Only one project from the Czech Republic has succeeded in the most prestigious European ERC Advanced Grant competition this year: the research of historian Kateřina Čapková from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. Her project, titled Inclusive History of East-Central Europe from the Mid-19th Century to the Present, is also the first research in the humanities and social sciences to be prepared at a Czech institution to succeed in this grant category. It received support of €2.5 million.
The project with the INHIST acronym (Inclusive History of East-Central Europe: Mid-19th Century to Present) has the ambition to develop a conceptually new interpretation of East-Central Europe that considers the multiple voices of historical actors. For such an analysis, Čapková has chosen the perspective of the Roma and Sinti, the Jews and people with disabilities as a priority.
The ERC Advanced Grants are exceptional scientific awards that are only given to internationally renowned experts with a proven impact on the development of their field. The European Research Council (ERC) awards the grants on the basis of a single criterion – the scientific excellence of the project and its investigator. Applicants must not only demonstrate a major contribution over the last decade but also present an original research vision with the potential to transform knowledge in the field. ERC grants are perceived as a guarantee of high quality and the ability to obtain them significantly influences the international standing of academic/research institutions.
This year, over two and a half thousand applications were submitted in this category in all disciplines, of which only 11% were successful. The team receives an exceptional grant of €2.5 million, i.e. more than 60 million crowns, to tackle the project.
“Receiving an ERC Advanced Grant for Dr Čapková’s humanities-oriented project is an outstanding achievement which I sincerely hope will not remain unique in the future. I am all the more pleased that the focus of the project contains the essence of contemporary quality humanities research – it is distinctly interdisciplinary, combines new methods of historical research with the aim of providing substantial input for understanding the challenges of today and future and pays attention to the voice of marginalised groups. I believe that these topics have an essential place in excellent research and education for the future, and I am very glad that Dr. Čapková has decided to enrich the research at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University with this project,” says Dean Eva Lehečková.
The starting point for INHIST is the contradiction between our interpretation of the present and the past. “Most European countries are aware that an inclusive concept of society and education is the key to greater security and resilience,” says Kateřina Čapková, adding, “But history textbooks or museum exhibitions are still dominated by the story of the national state. In such interpretations, the stories of many other social actors do not come into play. Until historians offer an inclusive interpretation of history, current attempts at social inclusion will stand in tension with how we think about our own history.”
The project is geographically focused on Poland, Ukraine, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. It traces the individual and collective efforts of emancipation through which Roma and Sinti, Jews and people with disabilities actively co-created the history of Central and Eastern Europe. Based on the sources of these communities in particular, Kateřina Čapková’s team will describe the basic processes of inclusion and segregation that are still taking place today. These include, for instance, the changing definitions of citizenship, access to education, work and healthcare. In addition, all three selected communities faced genocide during the Second World War.
“I am looking forward to tackling the project for many reasons,” Čapková adds. “It is the logical outcome of my partial research interests. Now everything should connect/come together? and bring something conceptually new. It is a great challenge. It would be a superhuman task for an individual. The foundation of the project is a unique team of young researchers I have managed to put together. It took me two years to select them. They are experts in the histories of the selected communities as well as in particular regions and themes. I have immense respect for their expertise and look forward to our discussions and reinterpretations together.”
The project’s sub-topics include research into the perspectives of wounded soldiers and civilians in Ukraine, both after World War II and during the current Russian aggression, or looking at society through the lens of Slovak Romani women who experienced coercive sterilization from the 1970s until the beginning of this century. The international research team consists of eight specialists in Romani and Jewish history and the history of people with disabilities. They come from seven European countries and have linguistic competence in at least ten languages, including Romani and Yiddish.
The main output of the project will be a joint book on the inclusive history of East-Central Europe. In addition, it will produce, for example, a database of primary sources representing the voices of the communities studied or an inclusive history textbook tested in secondary schools in all the countries studied.
Kateřina Čapková, Ph. D., is at the forefront of Czech experts focusing on modern Jewish history in Central and Eastern Europe, the history of the Roma and Sinti as well as the history of refugees and migrants in the twentieth century. She works as a researcher at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where she is to join the department full-time in October 2025 after finishing her research stay at the Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig. Concurrently, she also teaches at the New York University in Prague. She has experience from internships in Oxford, Chicago, Berlin, Vienna and Basel.
She is the author and co-author of a number of books, including the Czechs, Germans, Jews? monography, the English edition of which has been awarded the Outstanding Academic Title award by the American magazine Choice. Together with Hillel Kieval, she is the co-editor of the Prague and Beyond book, dedicated to the history of Jews in Bohemian lands from the early modern period to the present. The book was also published in German, Hebrew and Czech. Next year, Oxford University Press will publish The Slánský Trial: A New History book, which Čapková co-wrote with Chad Bryant and Diana Dumitru.
Čapková is the head of the Prague Centre for Romani Histories, one of the research centres of the Charles University Faculty of Arts (more at www.romanihistories.org).
In December 2024, she was awarded the prestigious Reimar Lüst Preis, which is awarded annually by the Humboldt Foundation and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. She is one of the editors of Jan Hauer’s Moji lidi publication, which was shortlisted for the Magnesia Litera Prize for Journalism in 2025.
