Institute of Musicology
Místnost č. 404
2015, Ph.D., Musicology, Charles University
2005-2006, international exchange student, University of Pretoria
2004, Mgr., Music Education and History, University of Hradec Králové
Vít Zdrálek graduated in secondary school teaching History and Music Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Hradec Králové. He received his PhD in Musicology at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. He completed a one-year study at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where he also conducted a repeated music ethnographic research in both urban and rural areas. For his dissertation studying individual experience in the environment of religious and popular music culture between apartheid and post-apartheid, he was awarded the 2016 Bolzano Prize by the Charles University. He has contributed to Tíha a beztíže folklore: Folklorní hnutí druhé poloviny 20. století v českých zemích (The Weight and Weightlessness of Folklore: The Folklore Movement of the Second Half of the 20th Century in the Czech Lands, Daniela Stavělova et al., Academia 2021). In his teaching, he focuses on (South) African music and the area of ethnomusicology. To the development of ethnomusicology in the Czech environment he contributed, among others, by the Czech translation of Timothy Rice’s book Etnomuzikologie: Velmi krátký úvod (orig. Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction, Karolinum 2020) and editing (together with Zuzana Jurková) the Czech translation of Timothy Rommen’s, Bruno Nettl’s et al. Exkurze do světové hudby (orig. Excursions in World Music, the 8th edition, Karolinum, in the publication process). Long-term research work in the Seminar of Cultural Analysis of Music, which he teaches in the Department of Musicology with Tereza Havelková, has culminated in an edited (with Tereza Havelková) volume Zvuk, gender, identita: Studie ke kulturní analýze hudby (Sound, Gender, Identity: Studies in Cultural Analysis of Music, Karolinum, in print). He is a member of the African Studies Study Group at the Strategic Regions Centre, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, organizing both scholarly and public African Studies-related events. He occasionally writes and speaks on African music and other musicological topics in the media.
2016, Bolzano Award of the Charles University for the best dissertation in humanities and social sciences.
2021, co-organizer of the conference Viva Africa 2021: Africa and (the Other) Europe: Imageries – Discourses – Exchanges, Charles University, online.
2021, co-convenor of the panel Ethnomusicology and music anthropology at the 6th biennial CASA conference 2021, Prague, online.
2020, Postcommunism, the African ‘outside’, and ‘the denial of coevalness’: The situation of African studies in the Czech Republic, Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds, Universiteit Leiden, online.
2018, „The dangerous supplement that takes-(the)-place: Derridean reading of the ’folklore movement’ in the Czech Republic“, BFE Annual Conference, University of Newcastle.
2017, “We all know that, don’t we?” Situating the scholarly knowledge about the Czech ‘folk music movement’ (preliminary thoughts), International Symposium Folklore Revival Movement of the Second Half of the 20th Century, Academy of Performing Arts, Prague.
2017, Filling the Void of Post-Apartheid: Miracles of the Zion Christian Church in the Life of South African Township Dweller, 7th European Conference on African Studies, ECAS7, University of Basel.
2017, What is in a Song? Performing Subjectivity and Performing the Nation in a South African Township, BFE Annual Conference, University of Sheffield.
Since 2012, I and my colleague Tereza Havelková have taught the bachelor’s and master’s research seminar combining perspectives of cultural analysis and ethnomusicology in the study of music.