Jan Ort is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. He obtained his PhD in Romani Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Ort has long been involved in anthropological, historical, and linguistic research among the Roma, largely in Slovakia and Czechia. His areas of focus include inter-ethnic relations, racialisation of the Roma, anti-Roma racism, Roma modes of sociability and mobility, Romani sociolinguistics, postwar history of the Roma in Czechoslovakia, postcolonialism, and decolonisation. In his PhD thesis, he examined the policies of the socialist Czechoslovak state towards its Romani population, shifting the emphasis on agency and experience of the Roma in these contexts (Karolinum Press, 2024). 

Based on his long-term ethnographic research in eastern Slovakia, Ort published the monograph Facets of a Harmony (Karolinum Press, 2022), which deals with strategies of sociability of the Roma in the face of their racialisation in an ethnically and linguistically diverse region. He also participated in the project “Genocide, Postwar Migration, and Social Mobility: Entangled Experiences of Roma and Jews.” Ort has taught courses on the Romani language and fieldwork at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, and has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany) and the Department of Anthropology, Durham University (UK). He is a member of the editorial board of the Czech Romani Studies journal Romano džaniben, where he edited a special issue on the social mobility of the Roma from a decolonial perspective.

Address: Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague, Czechia