Michael Beníšek holds a PhD in General Linguistics from Charles University and currently serves as an assistant professor in the Romani Studies Department within the Institute of Ethnology and Central European and Balkan Studies at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. His teaching portfolio covers courses on the Romani language, including theoretical courses on Romani grammar and dialectology as well as introductory Romani Studies courses.

Beníšek’s research centres on dialectology and the documentation and description of the Romani language, with a focus on Romani dialects spoken in the Slovak-Ukrainian borderland and Ukraine’s Transcarpathia and Galicia regions. His doctoral thesis offers an in-depth grammatical description of Eastern Uzh Romani varieties spoken in and around Uzhhorod, Ukraine, and stands as the most detailed English-language description of this Romani dialect to date. His expertise extends to the historical grammar of Romani, its links to other Indo-Aryan languages, and a history of the academic discourse surrounding the origins of the Romani people. He has contributed two chapters (one as the sole author, one as a co-author) to The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics (2020) and has authored several papers on the history of Romani in renowned peer-reviewed journals. 

Since 2002, Beníšek has conducted extensive fieldwork research on Romani in Ukraine and Slovakia, spending approximately a year in the field, largely in Ukraine. Fluent in the Romani dialects spoken in West Ukraine, he has fostered connections with numerous community members and Romani representatives in Ukraine, actively collaborating with them to disseminate knowledge about Ukraine’s Romani communities.