Contact: smejda@ksa.zcu.cz
Ladislav Šmejda (Ph.D., University of West Bohemia, Pilsen) is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and Department of Spatial Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Czechia. At the earlier stage of his career, he was affiliated with departments of Archaeology and Ecology, respectively. As part of his doctoral study, he spent one year as a Marie Curie ITN Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of York, UK (project CHIRON – Cultural Heritage Informatics Research Oriented Network). His research is focused on questions of human use of space and human ecology, both in the past and present. Ladislav Šmejda has frequently combined methods of archaeology with those of natural sciences in his research. He has conducted fieldwork in the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Iceland, Greece, Israel, Jordan, and Senegal. In 2009 he published a monograph on the mapping of archaeological landscape heritage with the aid of aerial and satellite imagery. L. Šmejda has presented invited lectures at the Sapienza University of Rome, University of Gothenburg and University of Pittsburgh. A broad range of interdisciplinary research interests lead him to work on editorial boards of the European Journal of Archaeology (from 2009 to 2012) and IANSA: Interdisciplinaria Archaeologica / Natural Sciences in Archaeology (since 2011), as well as on the International Advisory Board of the Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (Springer). He has organized and co-organized a number of conferences, conference sessions and workshops. Several edited books resulted from these academic events.