Jan Váňa is the Head of the Literature and Society Laboratory at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In 2023, he was awarded the prestigious Junior Star grant by the Czech Science Foundation to lead an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. His academic honors include a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology and a Junior Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He was nominated for the SAGE Prize for Innovation/Excellence for his article on theorizing the social through literary fiction. In 2022, he received the Czech Literary Book Club Award for his sociological novel Křehkost (Fragility), which explores the oppressive power of gender norms. His research interests include sociology and literature, cultural sociology, sociological and literary theory, and sociological fiction.
