Martin Babička

Martin Babička is an intellectual and cultural historian, focusing mainly on late 20^th century East-Central Europe. His research interests include the history of neoliberal thought and culture, ideas of nature and the environment and politics of knowledge. Martin obtained his doctorate in 2024 from the University of Oxford. His dissertation project, which he is currently turning into a book, examined connections between Czech market reforms and ecological critique during and after the collapse of state socialism. Since 2023, Martin has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has also held several visiting fellowships, including at the Leibniz Centre for the Contemporary History in Potsdam, and, most recently, a Visegrad Fellowship at the University of Warsaw.  As a Koch History Centre Fellow, Martin will investigate how Czechoslovak ecologists working under late socialism devised new concepts to escape the apparent ideological impasse between socialist productivism and ecological limits.