The year 2025 marks the centennial of the birth of Czech musicologist and
ethnologist Vladimír Karbusický (1925–2002). Karbusický’s active and prolific
career spanned several decades and reflected the changing landscape and the
paradoxes of Czechoslovak socialist-era social sciences and humanities. In the
1950s, Karbusický began as a folklorist in the newly established Academy of
Sciences and participated in a large ideologically influenced research project
focused on the mining region around Kladno. The Khruschev thaw allowed him to
seek inspiration in trends outside the Eastern Block, and Karbusický began to
establish himself in international scholarly networks. His interests ranged
from musicology to aesthetics, folklore, semiotics, history, sociology, and
philosophy. This period ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the
publication of his iconoclastic book on Lenin’s theory of reflection. The
situation made Karbusický emigrate to West Germany where he was appointed a
professor at the University of Hamburg. After the fall of socialism in 1989,
he regularly returned to his home country and established collaborations with
Czech institutions.
Following Karbusický’s career footsteps and using him as an example, we invite
scholars to join us in exploring some of the pertinent issues of the
twentieth-century social sciences and humanities in Central Europe. We would
like to focus on the following themes:
1) Karbusický, his life and work;
2) Interdisciplinarity between musicology, ethnology, and beyond;
3) Clashes between individual ambitions and the socialist institutions;
4) The many guises of politics in socialist-era scholarship;
5) The crossing of the Iron Curtain and the growing internationalization in the social sciences after the 1950s
6) Émigré scholars and their relationships to their home countries.
Conference dates: November 7–8, 2025
Conference venue: Musicological Library of the Institute of Art History, Czech
Academy of Sciences, Puškinovo náměstí 9, 160 00 Prague
Submission guidelines: Please send your abstract of max. 1800 characters/250
words to Matěj Kratochvíl (kratochvil@eu.cas.cz) and Václav Kapsa
(kapsa@udu.cas.cz) by June 30, 2025. You will be notified about the selection
of submissions in June 2025. We expect the final papers to be 20 minutes long.
The language of the conference will be English.
The conference is organized by the Institute of Ethnology and the Institute of
Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.