Hana Cervinkova - Biography#

Hana Cervinkova is a Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at Maynooth University (Ph.D., New School for Social Research in New York, 2004). She is an educational, political and urban anthropologist with a geographic focus on East/Central Europe. Her initial ethnographic research in the Czech military focused on the cultural and political paradoxes of post-socialist transformation. Her current work highlights issues of nationalism, racism and memory as they emerge in the everyday educational and political discourses and practices in East/Central Europe. The politics of memory and history figure prominently in her urban-based research, much of which she has dedicated to exploring and making public the silenced heritage of the formerly multicultural societies of Central Europe. Cervinkova also published on anthropology of post-socialism and post-colonialism and participatory and action research methodologies.

Cervinkova's developed and led a number of international grants and initiatives, including a Horizon 2020-funded European doctoral training scheme (European Doctorate in Teacher Education, 2016 - 2020) and award-winning international study programs in partnership with North American universities. Between 2003 - 2019 she worked in Central Europe holding a number of leadership positions in academia and in the public sector. She is active within the American Anthropological Association and belongs to the Council on the Anthropology of Education. At the European Association of Social Anthropologists, she served as an elected member of the Executive Committee (2013 - 2016) and Vice-President (2015 - 2016). In the public sphere, as the President of Centennial Hall in Wroclaw, a UNESCO World Heritage site, she developed and implemented major preservation projects, which included the acquisition and management of significant public investment funds to help save one of Europe's most important early-Modernist architectural complexes of the 20th century.