Gábor Oláh is a recent Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University, where he also works as a lecturer. He graduated from the Academic Study of Religions (2006) and Sociology (2008) and these fields form the background for his academic and research interests. Recently, he has been working on the topic of performativity of collective memory from a cultural-sociological perspective. His dissertation focuses on issues such as cultural trauma, event theory, iconicity, and materiality. His field of research is in Budapest, Hungary, where he explores statues, memorials, squares, and museums that provide conflicting meanings and are produced and maintained by interpretive and memory communities (Oláh & Szaló, forthcoming).
He participates in the department as a lecturer in the courses Introduction to Cultural Sociology, Sociological Theory, and General Sociology. He is in charge of organizing the Sociology department’s annual international conference Identities in Conflict, Conflict in Identities and the International Summer School on Cultural Sociology: Memory, Culture & Identity. He was a research group member in the projects Collective Memory and Transformation of Urban Space (2012-2014) (Oláh 2013) and Detraditionalization and Individualization of Religion in the Czech Republic (2006-2008) (Oláh, Hamar, & Ondrašinová 2008).
Since 2013, he has been an actively participating member of the curatorium of the non-profit Unfinished Past Foundation, which focuses on recent social and cultural problems in regional and global correlations. The first result of the foundation is the book Transnational Politics and the History of the Memory of the Holocaust (Zombory-Szász 2014 - published in Hungarian).
Oláh speaks Hungarian as his mother tongue. He was born in Slovakia and now lives in Brno, in the Czech Republic. He has a four-year-old son whom with he frequently goes to spot trains.