Martin Furmanik & Miroslav Števík

PhDr. Martin Furmanik, PhD. was born on 23 August 1989 in Žilina. After studying at the Janko Francisci Rimavský Grammar School in Levoča, he completed his master’s degree at the Department of History of the Faculty of Arts at Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica. He subsequently pursued doctoral studies at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Košice. He successfully completed his PhD in Slovak History in 2016. Since then, he has worked at the Spiš Museum in Spišská Nová Ves. His research focuses on the history of the Spiš region in the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic and issues concerning national minorities. He has published around thirty scholarly and academic studies and more than 100 popular-history articles. He has co-authored several monographs on municipalities in the Spiš region. He is the author of the monograph Spiš and the Establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic and the author or co-author of several other scholarly and popular publications. He is also engaged in prose writing.

Mgr. Miroslav Števík was born on 6 March 1965 in Čadca. He completed his secondary education at the Secondary Pedagogical School in Seč, in the Chrudim district. From 1987 to 1992, he studied history and geography at the Faculty of Education of Matej Bel University. From 1997 to 2012, he worked as a historian at the Ľubovňa Museum in Stará Ľubovňa, and since 2012 he has worked at the Spiš Museum in Spišská Nová Ves. He has organised international academic conferences and edited conference proceedings, including On the Medieval History of Spiš (2003), On the History of Podolínec and Early Modern Spiš (2006), Spiš in the 12th and 13th Centuries (2011), and A Tribute to Ivan Chalupecký (2012). From 2007 to 2012, he served as editor-in-chief of the Sącz–Spiš Notebooks, and from 2011 to 2015 he was a member of the programme board of the Muszyna Almanac. Since 2012, he has been the editor of the social sciences section of the regional studies journal Spiš. His research focuses on the development of settlement and historical geography, with particular emphasis on the territory of Spiš.

Martin Furmanik and Miroslav Števík have jointly published several popular and scholarly books on the history of Spiš. These include the collective monographs History of the Rusyns in Spiš and History of the Germans in Spiš, the catalogues Spiš County (12th Century–1922) and Minorities in Spiš, as well as the book series A Journey Through the History of Spiš, which has so far been published in six volumes. The book History of the Germans in Spiš won first place in the 2023 Book of the Prešov Self-Governing Region competition and also received the Literary Fund Prize for 2023.