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 is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. 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.
Prior to his appointment in Prague, Dr. Testa was Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct at the University of Vienna (2015-2019).
Trained in 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).

Alessandro Testa has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic fieldworks in Italy (2010-2012), Czech Republic (2013-2014; 2020-2022), and Catalonia (Spain) (2016-2021). In the past decade 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.
His 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 include five authored books, five edited volumes, some 70 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 more than 200 key-note talks, invited lectures, and conference presentations in 30 countries. The Max Planck Institute in Halle/Saale, Sorbonne in Paris, Humboldt University in Berlin, Boston University and Harvard University in Cambridge are among the institutions where he has given lectures.
For years he has been teaching courses in Historical Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Anthropology of Cultural Heritage, 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.

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

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