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About Me

Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Victoria started her academic career as a psychologist with specialization in the area of helping children with severe disabilities, and this period formed part of her broader interest to the historical roots of ongoing institutional violence against diverse disfranchised groups. In 2008, Victoria transferred to the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and began to elaborate the issue of institutional violence against the Roma and people with disabilities in the Czech lands. It has led her to deepen the approaches towards race science and racial thinking as agents and structures of nation-building and inclined to revise the spatial, temporal and ideological borders in the taken-for-granted approaches toward the role of researchers and academic institutions in the most extremal forms of transgression.

Recent Publications

a/ Research monographs:

Victoria Shmidt, Karl Kaser 2023 A critical history of health films in Eastern Europe and beyond London: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/A-Critical-History-of-Health-Films-in-Central-and-Eastern-Europe-and-Beyond/Shmidt-Kaser/p/book/9781032215143

b/Edited volume

Victoria Shmidt and Simone De Angelis (2026) Blumenbach’s Racial Classification:Deconstructing the Timeless Call for Human Differentiation. Springer Nature https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-15950-2

Victoria Shmidt  (Ed.) 2025. The Politics of Disability in interwar and socialist Czechoslovakia: Segregating in the name of the nation  Routledge.  https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-of-Disability-in-Interwar-and-Socialist-Czechoslovakia-Segregating-in-the-Name-of-the-Nation/Shmidt/p/book/9781041188742

Victoria Shmidt and Nadya Jaworsky (2024) special issue “Romani people as object and subject of scientific inquiry: Scientification of Roma or RomaNization of science?” Romani Studies  1 https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/rost/34/1

Shmidt, V. (2024). “Racial thinking among Czech anthropologists: The case of Vojtěch Suk”. In Off white. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Retrieved Jun 21, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526172211.00011

Shmidt, Victoria, ‘Czech Child Protection after 1989: Between Socialist Legacy and the European Call for Democratic Legitimacy’, in Jill Duerr Berrick, Neil Gilbert, and Marit Skivenes (eds), Oxford Handbook of Child Protection Systems (2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Mar. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197503546.013.16

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

Eastern Europe, Germany, Russia, United States, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Disability, Medicine, Race, Science