Václav Zheng is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern Europe, with a research focus on East Central Europe, particularly the West Slavic lands. He is also a historical theorist engaging in the philosophy of historiography. For the past five years, he has designed and taught seven undergraduate seminars at Johns Hopkins' Arts and Science and the Peabody Institute.

Currently, he is working on a monograph project, tentatively titled The Age of Euchronia: Hope, Anxiety, and the Polish Renaissance. It offers a cultural and emotional reading of a cluster of Polish political thinkers in the second half of the sixteenth century and their collective utopian dreams about a perfect future world.

Besides, he is compiling a publication on the pursuit of the ideal society by fifteenth-century Polish intellectuals, titled Ethics, Justice, and the Ideal Society in Late Medieval Poland: An Anthology, and co-editing a collaborative volume on premodern utopian history, Sparks: Political, Intellectual, and Religious Utopia in the Premodern World.

If you have any questions about Hopkins' history program or historiography in general, or you would like to collaborate on a research project or a conference panel, please contact at [email protected].

For further information, please check www.vaclavzheng.com