PhDr. Oldřich Tůma, Ph.D.

Oldřich Tůma devotes himself to contemporary history: the post-1945 history of Czechoslovakia and the Cold War history. His original research focus was on medieval history and Byzantine history.

After the GCSE exam (1969), he read history and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. In 1975, he was expelled from the University for Political Reasons. He was allowed to complete his studies as an extramural student (1980; PhDr. degree in 1982). He obtained a Ph.D. degree at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University in 2007.

Expelled from the university, he had several non-academic jobs (labourer, assistant educator, archivist). At the same time, he devoted himself to Byzantine history studies, occasionally publishing in foreign and local journals. In 1989, he got a full-time job in the then existing Institute of Classical Studies of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, the Department of Byzantine Studies of which he had been cooperating with before, e.g. incognito as a member of the editorial staff of the “Byzantinoslavica” journal. In 1992, or rather in 1993, having returned from an internship at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, he joined the Institute for Contemporary History, where he held the position of the director from 1998 till 2017.

Oldřich Tůma has been or still is a member of domestic and foreign scientific bodies, including Doctoral Programme Councils at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University or the Faculty of Philosophy and Sciences of the Silesian University; editorial boards of the Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History), Journal of Cold War History, Jahrbuch für historische Kommunisforschung journals; Scientific Council of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity or the Hannah Arendt Institut für Totalitarismusforschung at the Technical University in Dresden.