Dr. Martin Zückert

Main Research Areas

• History of the first Czechoslovak Republic
• History of religion and the church in East Central Europe in the twentieth century
• History of ethnic studies relating to Sudeten Germans / expellees
• Military history
• Interethnic relations
• Environmental and infrastructural history in East Central Europe

Research Project

Die Erschließung der Karpaten. Staatliche Strukturpolitik, Nutzungskonflikte und ökologische Veränderungen in einer Gebirgsregion im Staatssozialismus 1945-1989

Structural Policies in the Slovakian Carpathians. State Development Policies and their Social and Ecological Consequences

Postdoctoral Project at the Graduate School

After 1945 the socialist state intervened in the peripheral Slovakian Carpathian region with its stagnating mining industry and traditional farming and brought about fundamental change through industrial development, structural policies, and the transformation of the agricultural sector, altering the life of the local population and the cultural space they inhabited beyond recognition. This project seeks to examine the concepts and plans on which the development of the mountainous region were based and the consequences of this development for the local population and the environment. It analyses how interventions into cultural space, usage conflicts, and new environmental hazards were negotiated under state socialist conditions. This approach makes it possible to investigate the relationship of the centre to the periphery in the specific Czechoslovakian context and to establish the extent to which there was an awareness of landscape and an ecological consciousness under socialism. On a more general level the project is concerned with the question of whether similar development paths were taken in other European countries in the second half of the twentieth century, or whether differences predominate in the development of natural and cultural spaces in East and West.

Curriculum Vitae

Martin Zückert studied history in Freiburg and Vienna (1993-1999) and made research visits in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 2003 he started his doctorate at the University of Freiburg. He did several years of freelance work in museums. 2001/2002 he was Research Assistant at the Department for Modern and Eastern European history at the University of Freiburg and since 2004 Research Assistant at the Collegium Carolinum where he is Managing Director since 2006. From 2009 to 2019 lecturer in the International Research Training Group "Religious Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe". Since 2014, postdoctoral fellow of the Graduate School. 

Positions, Assignments and Memberships

• Former member of the Study Group "Knowledge, Space, Environment"
• Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Adalbert Stifter Society (since 2006)
• Member of the Historical Commission for the Bohemian Lands
• Member of the Commission for German and Eastern European Anthropology
• Member of the Herder Research Council
• Member of the international Editorial Board of Vojenská história (Bratislava; since 2009)
• Member of the international Editorial Board of Střed (Prague; since 2009)

Publications

List of publications (Collegium Carolinum website)