Dr. Eva Kundtová Klocová with her recently defended dissertation "Body in Ritual Space: Communicating Through Embedded Practices in Religious Ritual" was awarded third place in the Dean's Prize for Excellent Dissertations.
This award is announced annually as part of the Humanities Week. Dr. Kundtová Klocová capitalized on her long-term research on the role of physicality in religious ritual practice and its influence on the cognitive and affective part of religious life. Thus, this work represents an extremely valuable contribution to the embodied cognition research.
Jana Nenadalová, Piotr Szymanek (Jagiellonian University), and Neil Van Leeuwen (Georgia State University) received a grant from the Open Science of Religion initiative (supported by the John Templeton Foundation) for a virtual reality study.
In his thesis, titled Costly signaling theory of pilgrimage: The case study of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, he studied whether pilgrimages may function as costly signals of commitment to group norms.
