Alessandro Testa is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague. Prior to this, he was Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Fellow and Adjunct at the University of Vienna (2015-2019).
He studied history, ethnology, and religious studies at several Italian and French universities, receiving his PhD in social anthropology in 2013. He is interested in a variety of themes in religious studies and in the historical and cultural anthropology of European societies, themes about which he has published and lectured extensively.
Dr. Testa has conducted long-term, intensive ethnographic fieldworks in Italy (2010-2012), Czech Republic (2013-2014; 2020-2022), Austria (2018), and Catalonia, Spain (2016-2021). In the past decade he has been affiliated for long terms with the Universities of Tallinn, Pardubice, Vienna, and Prague, and has also been a visiting scholar at universities and academies in Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Iceland, and the U.S.
Among his latest books and edited volumes, to date (2025), there are “‘Re-enchantment’ and Religious Change in Former Socialist Europe” (2024), “Ritualising Cultural Heritage and Re-Enchanting Rituals in Europe” (2023), “Popular Culture, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Catalonia” (2023), “Politics of Religion: Authority, Creativity, Conflicts” (2021), and “Rituality and Social (Dis)Order” (2020). He has also authored approximately 80 peer-reviewed articles in journals and chapters in edited volumes. His works have been published in 7 different languages. And he has delivered above 200 talks and conference presentations in more than 30 countries.
Alessandro Testa is a polyglot (he can speak seven languages fluently) with a passion for literature, philosophy, music, biology, cinema, Czech beers, and other things that do not necessarily fit well with one another.
