PhD, Post-doc Candidate, History, University of New South Wales, Australia
Dr. Jan Láníček was born in Ostrava, the Czech Republic. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southampton in Britain (supervised by Professor Tony Kushner) and, in 2011-2012, heldaPrins Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Dr. Láníček currently lives in Sydney and works as a post-doctoral fellow in Jewish history at the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales. He also serves as Vice-President (for New South Wales) of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies. He recently published a monograph entitled Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews, 1938-1948: Beyond Idealisation and Condemnation (Palgrave, 2013), and also co-edited a volume on Governments-in-Exile and the Jews during the Second World War (Vallentine Mitchell, 2013).
Láníček’s post-doctoral project analyzes Jewish/non-Jewish relations in East-Central Europe from 1933 to 1939 through the prism of the international construction of the ‘Jewish minority question’. The project will add new dimensions of understanding to the topic by addressing the ways in which the international community treated the Jewish question in the framework of the Minorities Treaties signed in 1919. The project offers four perspectives on the main research question: a) the way in which East-Central European countries (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania) in the 1930s attempted to transform their domestic Jewish question into an international issue; b) the perception of the Jewish minority in the countries in comparison with other ethnic minorities; c) the treatment of the Jewish minority question in the region by international actors; d) perspectives offered by various western Jewish activists. The lenses provide comprehensive insights into Jewish life in East-Central Europe in the 1930s shortly before the Holocaust.