doc. Alessandro Testa, Ph.D.

doc. Alessandro Testa, Ph.D.

Působiště:

  • Katedra sociologie

E-mail: alessandro.testa@fsv.cuni.cz , alessandro.testa@fsv.cuni.cz

Telefon: +420 267 224 238

Osobní webová stránka

Místnost: č. B223, Jinonice, budova B

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4060-651X

CV

Alessandro Testa is currently (2025) Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Prior to this, he was Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct at the University of Vienna, Austria.

He is interested in a variety of themes in religious studies and in the historical and cultural anthropology of European societies, themes about which he has published and lectured extensively.

Prof. Testa studied history, ethnology, and religious studies at the Universities of Florence, Rome, Paris, and Messina; he received his PhD in social anthropology in 2013. Later he obtained academic habilitations for professorship in social anthropology (2017), history of religions (2022), and European ethnology (2022).

He has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic fieldworks in Italy (2010-2012), Czech Republic (2013-2014; 2020-2022), Austria (2018), and Catalonia, Spain (2016-2021). In the past dozen years, he has been affiliated for long terms with the Universities of Tallinn, Pardubice, Vienna, and Prague, and has also been a visiting scholar in Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Iceland, and the U.S.

Dr. Testa’s main research fields are social and historical anthropology and religious studies, with a focus on the ethnology and cultural history of Europe, ritual studies, comparative religion, and cultural heritage studies. His research interests encompass topics ranging from public rituality to secularisation and de-secularisation, from longue-durée cultural continuities to current social transformations, from popular cultures to vernacular forms of religiosity, from ancient mythologies and paganism to esotericism and new forms of spirituality, from cultural heritage-making to collective memories, identity formation, and nationalism in Europe, and from theories and methods in social and historical sciences to epistemology. These topics have been approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion and explored theoretically and empirically, either comparatively (at the pan-European or global level) or with a special attention to Central-Eastern and Mediterranean Europe.

Alessandro Testa's research outputs to date (2025) include five authored books, five edited volumes, some 80 peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in volumes, and other dozens of diverse pieces of writing (reviews, reports, non-peer-reviewed articles, etc.). His works have been published in nine different languages, and his research has also been presented orally in above 200 key-note talks, invited lectures, and conference presentations in more than 30 countries. The Max Planck Institute in Halle/Saale, Sorbonne in Paris, Humboldt University in Berlin, Boston University, Harvard University, University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley, are among the institutions where he has taught.

For years he has been teaching courses in Historical Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Anthropology of Cultural Heritage, Anthropology of Central-Eastern Europe, Globalisation, Collective Identities and Social Belonging, and Ethnographic Methods. Numerous theses and projects were or are being supervised by him.

After having successfully completed several individual projects for prestigious research schemes (Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship, Marie Curie / OPVVV), he was (2020-2022) Principal Investigator for the ERC CZ project “ReEnchEu – The Re-Enchantment of Central-Eastern Europe”, for which he led and managed a team of five scholars from four different countries.

He is also a member of the most important international scientific societies in his fields (among which are EASR, EASA, SIEF, SISR, and SIAC) and chairs or sits on several scholarly and editorial boards as well as in a number of doctoral and academic committees throughout Europe.

His long and profound international experience has led him to become a polyglot – he can write and speak seven languages and has a good understanding or a passive knowledge of another half a dozen.

Apart from his (multi)disciplinary expertise in Social and Historical Sciences, he has a strong interest in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive sciences, and biology, but his true loves remain literature, music, cinema, and fine arts.

Email: alessandro.testa@fsv.cuni.cz
Web-page: https://cuni.academia.edu/AlessandroTesta

Rok vydání

Monografie

Kapitoly v monografiích

Články

Příspěvky v konferenčních sbornících

Anthropology of Cultural Heritage

Anthropology of Religion

Historical Anthropology

Theories of Magic (in Social Anthropology and History of Religions)

Theories of Popular Cultural and Popular Religion

Anthropology of East-Central Europe

Understanding Identity and Social Belonging

Qualitative Research Methods

Religion in the Public Sphere

Cultural Heritage: Ideas, Objects, and Practices

The Anthropology of Museums and Musealisation

Religion in New Media

Research Areas: Social and Cultural Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Ethnology of Europe, History and Anthropology of Religion, Historical Anthropology and Cultural History, Cultural Heritage Studies

Regional Areas: Europe (comparatively); Mediterranean, central, and post-socialist Europe, notably Italy, Austria, France, Catalonia (Spain), Czech Republic