Vitezslav Sommer
Vítězslav Sommer received his PhD from Charles University in Prague in 2011. His dissertation explored the origins of communist party historiography in Czechoslovakia and its development in the Stalinist, post-Stalinist and reform communist period (1950-1970).
Vítězslav joined the Futurepol project in 2013. His research explores the transformations of Czechoslovak “future studies” from the “scientific and technological revolution” (STR) research project in the 1960s and 1970s to prognostika (economic forecasting) in the perestroika period. His main research topics are the institutional and social background of the “future studies” in state socialist Czechoslovakia; analysis of the knowledge produced by STR and prognostika and its practical application in the policies of the socialist state; and the transnational dimension of Czechoslovak “future studies”.
Since January 2015, Vítězslav Sommer is head of the research project "The Road to Technocratic Socialism: Concepts of Governance in Socialist Czechoslovakia (1953-1975)" at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. He has been recruited as a permanent researcher of the Institute for Contemporary Czech Republic but is still collaborating to Futurepol's research project.
Latest publications
- SOMMER, Vitezslav. « Scientists of the world, unite! Radovan Richta’s theory of a Scientific and Technological Revolution ». In eds. Aronova Elena, Science Studies during the Cold War and beyond. Paradigms defected, Palgrave /Studies in the History of Science and Technology, Palgrave, 2016, p. 177-205.
- MC DERMOTT, Kevin, SOMMER, Vitezslav: The ‘Club of Politically Engaged Conformists’? The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Popular Opinion, and the Crisis of Communism, 1956, CWIHP Working Paper No. 66, March 2013.
- SOMMER, Vitezslav. Cesta ze slepé uličky “třetího odboje”: Koncepty rezistence a studium socialistické diktatury v Československu [A Way Out of the “Third Resistance” Cul de Sac: Concepts of Resistance and the Study of Socialist Dictatorship in Czechoslovakia], Soudobé dějiny 1/2012, pp. 9–36.
- SOMMER, Vitezslav. Angažované dějepisectví: Stranická historiografie mezi stalinismem a reformním komunismem, 1950–1970. [Engaged Historiography: Party Historiography between Stalinism and Reform Communism, 1950–1970] Nakladatelství Lidové noviny – FF UK, Prague 2011.
