March 2027

Jan Jakub Surman is a historian of science specializing in the intellectual and political dimensions of knowledge production in Central and Eastern Europe. He is affiliated with the Department for History of the Academy of Sciences at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he contributes to research on the history of science and scientists in twentieth-century society. His work is situated at the intersection of political-historical epistemology, the history of science in translation, and the transformation of scientific cultures in post-imperial, post-Soviet and Central European contexts.

Surman studied history and sociology at the University of Vienna, where he obtained degrees in both fields before completing his PhD in History in 2012. His academic career has been marked by numerous international fellowships and research stays, including positions at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the Max Weber Kolleg in Erfurt, the Herder Institute in Marburg, and Princeton University.

He is currently Principal Investigator of major research projects, including “Images of science” in Czechoslovakia 1918–1945–1968 and a Czech Science Foundation project on Czechoslovak-Polish scholarly entanglements during the Cold War.

His publications include the monograph Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space (2018), as well as numerous articles and edited volumes on scientific knowledge, language, and transnational intellectual exchange.