OP JAK CoRe welcomes visiting researchers for 3-8 month stays

This visiting position does not require terminating your employment at your home institution; it is designed to support a period of concentrated residential research at Masaryk University’s Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic), resulting in data and a publication. For details about eligibility, see below.

The stay should take place between 1 October 2026 and 30 June 27.

Research focus

The topic of all visiting appointments is medieval antiheretical hate speech – specifically, individual instances of offensive, derogatory, or othering language against heresy in Latin or vernacular sources in medieval Western Christianity (c. 1000–1500). The project should not focus on broad discourse analysis or general study of hostile narratives. Instead, the work focuses on:

• identifying individual lexical items (e.g., tropes, labels, adjectives, formulae, descriptors) used to stigmatize heterodox or marginalised groups;
• collecting these one-by-one within a digital annotation environment;
• classifying them into an expanding taxonomy of medieval antiheretical hate speech, using structured annotation workflows;
• developing prompts for AI-powered information extraction with large language models;
• contributing to systematic, computationally analysable datasets.

The data you will collect under this internship will be used in research for a publication that you will lead or co-author, form part of our growing dataset, and remain the property of Masaryk University but licensable for further publication collaboration. Publications supported by the project can have a double affiliation, to your own institution and Masaryk University. The Johannes Amos Comenius funding must be acknowledged.

The expected scholarly outcome of the stay is one submitted research article (quartile 1 journal in the Web of Science or Scopus databases) based on the newly collected data.

About the research team

The DISSINET research group integrates historical, philological, and computational methods to analyse how medieval Christian authors constructed and transmitted hostile representations of religious nonconformity. 

Your research stay will involve:

• studying medieval sources and their contexts;
• cleaning and curating parts of a digital full text corpus of interest for your research under CoRe;
• collecting and annotating individual hate‑speech expressions using our digital tools;
• cross-validating information extracted with the use of large language models;
• collaborating with DISSINET researchers on categories, taxonomy, and annotation protocols;
• preparing and submitting one article based on the new dataset.

Who we are looking for

We welcome applicants from doctoral through postdoc to senior career stage. You should have:

• training in history, medieval studies, medieval Latin philology, study of religions, or a related field;
• strong reading competence in Latin;
• competence in historical research;
• a computer‑friendly mindset and readiness to engage in structured digital annotation;
• ability to communicate and write in English (C1 or higher).

(We do not require any previous research background in medieval heresy, anti-heretical literature, medieval religious hate speech, or digital methods. We do require, however, a strongly computer-friendly mindset.)

What we offer

• Highly competitive monthly remuneration, safely covering your accommodation in Brno and other expenses. Extra family allowance if coming with a family.
• Integration into a highly interdisciplinary team working at the frontier of computational medieval studies.
• Training in digital annotation, corpus methods, and collaborative data collection.
• Close mentorship from the PI and senior team members.
• Participation in a research environment producing high‑profile publications across humanities and the social sciences.
• Friendly, collegial working atmosphere.

Brno is a vibrant university city, two hours by direct train from Vienna and Prague, offering excellent academic and cultural life.

The deadline for submitting a CV, a brief cover letter (motivation, competence, how many months and when you would like to work with us in Brno; we have a slight preference for the full 8 months, but will evaluate this in context) a brief preliminary research proposal  (1-2 pages, structure of your choice, preliminary article topic focusing on quantitative research into antiheretical hate speech outlined), and an academic writing sample authored by the candidate to Prof. Dr. David Zbíral (david.zbiral@mail.muni.cz) is 25 May 2026.

We will then perform a selection to identify the best candidates. The first round will be based exclusively on the evaluation of the submitted materials. The second round will involve an interview through videoconference including the presentation of your research proposal and an oral Latin translation & semantic annotation test (medieval antiheretical text in Latin). The final round will involve the evaluation of a more detailed research proposal that the shortlisted candidates will be invited to submit.

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Eligibility - “Foreign researchers” (in relation to the Czech Republic) are welcome to apply. A foreign researcher is defined as a researcher who, during the last 5 years (as of the date of commencement of work in the project’s expert team or as of the date of commencement of mobility), has worked for at least 2 years outside the Czech Republic in research on at the minimum of 0.5 FTE, or has been a Ph.D. student (or a similar program, equivalent to ISCED Level 8) abroad. Czech citizens are not excluded.