Martin Babička

Research Topic: Children of Paradise: Technology, Nature and Time in Czechoslovakia 1970-2000

Supervisors: Katherine Lebow, David Priestland

'This delight in the power of the mind was made up of expectation, was a war-like game, a kind of undefined, masterful claim on the future.' - Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 1930

'Our home is paradise
Oh thanks to science, thanks
Comfort is paradise
At a push of a button in our hands' - a 1985 Czechoslovak pop song

My doctoral project deals with the changing meanings of 'technology' and 'nature', the ways in which they were tied to collectives and subjects and deployed in the production of ‘desirable futures’ in Czechoslovakia from post-Stalinism to postsocialism. I am interested in the ways techno-optimistic ideas about progress and the notion of ecological crisis intersected with the collapse of state socialism and the subsequent neoliberal transformation. I study public experts, popularisers, sci-fi creators, nature writers, journalists and economists active in Czechoslovakia from the late 1960s to the late 1990s and their fictions - from 'Robinsons of outer space' to nature as a metaphor for the markets. 

I am funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council UK - David Richards Scholarship at Wadham College. 

Areas of interest

• History of neoliberalism, capitalist economic thought and culture
• History of time and space
• State socialism and postsocialist transformation
• Modern and contemporary East-Central Europe, Czech history
• Cultural history of technology and nature, nature/society divide
• Postcolonial theory
• Memory studies, public history and history education

Publications

Babička, Martin. “A 'Right to Sadness': Late Socialist Environmentalism between Technocracy and Romanticism and the Czech Nature Writer Jaromír Tomeček.” Kontradikce 6, no. 2 (2023): 67–90. https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/view/uuid:3b50185a-ea69-47da-ad21-9bb326cb3206?article=uuid:cc218233-9d54-4cc2-96ad-c8b026706e24

Babička, Martin. "“The future is in your hands”: temporality and the neoliberal self in the Czech voucher privatization." Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 30, no. 1 (2022): 83-99. DOI: 10.1080/25739638.2022.2044616