doc. Alessandro Testa, Ph.D.

doc. Alessandro Testa, Ph.D.

Posts:

  • Department of Sociology

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

Telephone: +420 267 224 238

Website

Rooms: No. B223, Jinonice, building B

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4060-651X

CV

Alessandro Testa works at the crossroads of religious studies and the historical and cultural anthropology of Europe, intellectual terrains he has explored extensively through scholarship and teaching.

He is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Prior to this, he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct at the University of Vienna.

Testa studied history, ethnology, and religious studies at 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), the history of religions (2022), and European ethnology (2022) - suggesting a commendable resistance to intellectual narrowness.

In the past fifteen years, he has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic research in central Italy, Bohemia (Czech Republic), Austria, and Catalonia (Spain). In this timespan, 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 re-enchantment, 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 the social and historical sciences to epistemology. These topics have been approached in a multidisciplinary fashion. He moves with equal ease between theory and fieldwork or archive work, and between global or pan-European comparisons and close regional focus - particularly on Central-Eastern and Mediterranean Europe.

Alessandro Testa's research outputs to date (2025) include five authored books (which have received two dozen scholarly reviews), six edited volumes, some 90 peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in volumes, and several dozen other 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 over 250 key-note talks, invited lectures, and conference presentations, and that 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 the University of California, Berkeley, are among the institutions where he has been invited and where he has taught.

For years he has been teaching courses in Historical Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Critical Cultural Heritage Studies, Anthropology of Central-Eastern Europe, Globalisation, Collective Identities and Social Belonging, Theories of Magic and the Occult, and Ethnographic Methods. Numerous theses and projects have been supervised by him.

After having successfully completed several individual projects for prestigious national and international research schemes (e.g., Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellowship and Marie Curie / OPVVV), he was (2020-2022) the 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 national and international scientific societies in his fields (EASR, EASA, SIEF, SISR, SIAC, CASA, CSR, and others) 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 committed polyglot: he can write and speak seven languages and has a good understanding or a passive knowledge of another half a dozen.

In addition to his recognised expertise, his intellectual appetite reaches into philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, and biology – though his curiosity extends beyond academia, and, like any well-rounded humanist, he ultimately returns to literature, music, cinema, and the fine arts.

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

Rok vydání

Monographs

Chapters in monographs

Articles

Contributions in the conference proceedings

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