Katia Riccardo receives Vice-Rector’s Award
Katia Riccardo receives Vice-Rector’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Studies in the academic year 2025/2026.
Dr. David Zbíral (Department for the Study of Religions, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University) has been awarded the prestigious Czech Science Foundation EXPRO (Projects of Excellence) grant for a five-year (2019-2023) research project Dissident Religious Cultures in Medieval Europe from the Perspective of Social Network Analysis and Geographic Information Systems (DISSINET). With a team of other four researchers, he will be exploring the use of network analytical and GIS methods in research into dissident religious communities of the Christian Middle Ages, which will lead to developing an innovative methodological framework for their study as well as to significant new findings on the geography and social microstructure of medieval dissident networks. The DISSINET project is one of only eight EXPRO projects supported in 2018 in the whole area of the humanities and the social sciences.
Katia Riccardo receives Vice-Rector’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Studies in the academic year 2025/2026.
Which medieval men and women were most prone to challenging the Church? Analysing 4,433 inquisitorial testimonies (1243–1522), a DISSINET study in the Journal of Cultural Analytics traces how contestation varied by religious group, gender, urban or rural setting, and period. It identifies women and countryfolk as the more frequent challengers, and finds that criticism grew over the period studied.