Lenka works in transnational feminisms and political ecology, particularly in the field of feminist visual ethnomycology
Lenka is a lecturer in Critical Studies at the Department of Art and a lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures. She is also a visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies, contemporary art, transnational feminisms and political ecology. She is particularly interested in examining the role forests, mushrooms and their foragers have played in the cultural and political imagination of European heteropatriarchal and colonial modernity, with the aim to generate new notions of belonging in a world defined by unequally distributed social precarity and ecological emergency.
Lenka is a co-founding member of transnational Feminist Readings Network and a member of Woods - Community for Cultivation, Theory and Art (Czechia). Before joining Goldsmiths, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the College of Human Sciences at UNISA (the University of South Africa).
Academic qualifications
PhD in Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom 2017
MA in Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom 2011
MgA. in Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic 2010
BcA. In Fine Arts, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic 2008
Teaching and supervision
TEACHING
modules convened and taught in Visual Cultures (BA History of Art, BA Fine Art and History of Art, BA Curating) and Art (BA Fine Art):
Modules convened and taught:
Feminist and Queer Technoscience (2nd year BA, Visual Cultures)
Landscape and Power (3rd year BA, Visual Cultures)
Feminist Lab: Art and Technoscience (2nd year BA, Fine Art, Critical Studies)
modules co-taught:
Beyond Boundaries (1st year BA Visual Cultures)
Fine Art Critical Studies (1st year Fine Art, Critical Studies)
SUPERVISION
supervisor of BA Dissertations in Visual Cultures (BA History of Art, BA Fine Art and History of Art)
supervisor of MA Dissertations in Visual Cultures (MA Contemporary Art Theory)
main supervisor of PhD Dissertation "Marianne North in Brazil: Gender, Female health and Plant Horror" (Hannah Wroe)
supervisor of BA Dissertations in Fine Art (Critical Studies)
For Term 1 of 2023-24 academic year Lenka was Acting Programme Leader for BA Curating Programme
Research interests
Lenka's current research focuses on three areas: The first area focuses on feminist visual ethnomycology. She examines how fungi have become ‘the threatening Other’ in the racist nationalisms in modern and contemporary Europe and how they can become a potent means to unravel the divisive binary ‘native’ vs. ‘alien.’ The second area concerns how gender operates in art education and entangles with Eurocentrism, capitalism and its correlate, the overcome state-socialism. The third strand of her research addresses the politics of the body in contemporary cultural theory, focusing on how translation–conceptualised as a necessary yet impossible practice–transforms the understanding of the key aspects of our political, socio-cultural and affective life such as embodiment, belonging and political and cultural representation.
Research areas: visual culture studies, contemporary art, feminist visual ethnomycology, transnational feminisms, critical and creative ecologies, embodiment and belonging, postcolonial and decolonial theories, feminist deconstruction, postsocialism, critical university studies and anti-disciplinarity, gender and art education, collaborative practice-led research methodologies.
Grants and awards
2022:
Mycorrhizal Encounters (Research England Enhancing Culture Fund)
with Dr Elspeth Mitchell, University of Leeds, UK.
2022:
ERC-funded Visiting Research Fellowship
Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, Czechia.
2021:
CoLeGen: exploring the colonial legacies of UK geoscience in Africa (AHRC and NERC seed funding for 'Hidden histories of encironmental science')
with Dr Pete Yeandle (Loughborough University), Dr Keely Mills (British Geological Survey) and Prof Eric Odada (University of Nairobi)
Vráblíková, Lenka. 2023. The University. In: Tilottama Rajan and Daniel Whistler, eds. The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 383-398. ISBN 9783031273445
