User:JitkaJindriskova/Rudolf Kučera (historian)

Rudolf Kučera (* 26 November 1980, Prague) is a Czech historian. He is the director of the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, associate professor of history at Charles University in Prague and permanent visiting professor at the University of Konstanz. He specializes in modern history of East-Central Europe, the history of war and violence, and the history of labour and protest.

Education and academic career
Rudolf Kučera studied history at Charles University in Prague, where he received his M.A. degree in 1998. He was then accepted for doctoral studies at the Free University of Berlin at the Berlin School for Comparative European History (BKVGE), where he was supervised by Philipp Ther and Jürgen Kocka. In 2008 he completed his PhD at the Free University of Berlin and Charles University in Prague and began working at the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

In 2009–2010 Kučera completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. In 2013–2014 he was a fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. After returning to Prague he became deputy director for Research at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the CAS. In 2017 he was appointed associate professor of history at Charles University in Prague and in 2019 he accepted an invitation as visiting professor at the University of Vienna.

In 2020, he became director of the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the CAS and from 2022 he is a permanent visiting professor at the University of Konstanz. From 2023 he is also the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Czech Science Foundation.

Kučera's research interests include comparative social and cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries in East-Central Europe, the history of the Habsburg Empire, the history of modern wars and violence, and the history of modern labour and protest.

Awards

 * 2023: Czech Academy of Sciences Award for outstanding research achievement for the book Paths out of the Apocalypse. Physical Violence in the Fall and Renewal of Central Europe, 1914–1922 (co-authored with Ota Konrád)
 * 2017: The Best Book Award in Czechoslovak Studies published in 2015–2016, granted by the American Czechoslovak Studies Association for Rationed Life: Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands, 1914–1918
 * 2015: The Otto Wichterle Prize of the Czech Academy of Sciences for Young Scientists

Selected publications

 * Kučera, Rudolf. Staat, Adel und Elitenwandel. Die Adelsverleihungen in Schlesien und Böhmen 1806–1871 im Vergleich. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012. (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft: 205). ISBN 9783525370261.
 * Kučera, Rudolf. Rationed Life. Science, Everyday Life, and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian lands, 1914–1918. Oxford – New York: Berghahn Books, 2016; 2019. ISBN 9781785331282 (2016); ISBN 9781789200768 (2019).
 * Kučera, Rudolf – Konrád, Ota. Paths out of the Apocalypse. Physical Violence in the Fall and Renewal of Central Europe, 1914–1922. Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN 9780192896780.