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Petr Janeček is a Prague ethnologist and folklorist. He works as an associate professor and deputy director of the Institute of Ethnology of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University; until 2013 he was the head of the Ethnographic Department of the National Museum. He has completed research stays and conducted field and archival research in the USA, Austria, Poland and Slovenia. His research focuses primarily on research into contemporary verbal folklore and the theory, methodology and history of folkloristics. He publishes on verbal folklore and related topics in the professional, cultural and social press. In 2006 he published the first Czech annotated collection of contemporary legends, Černá sanitka a jíne ésivé příběhy, which met with considerable interest from the general and professional public and which was followed in 2007 and 2008 by other collections, Černá sanitka: Druhá žeň and Černá sanitka: Třikrát a dost. The Black Ambulance was dramatized as a retro cabaret from the 1980s by Brno's HaDivadlo and staged for radio by the Czech Radio Leonardo radio station. A fifteen-part television series of the same name was also created based on its motifs, which has been broadcast by Czech Television since September 2008. His other publications include a collection of contemporary Czech ghost stories, Bloody Mary and Other Horrible Stories (2015) and the scholarly monograph The Myth of the Pérák. An Urban Legend Between Folklore and Popular Culture (2017), which is being prepared for publication in the USA this year. In 2020, he published another book from the Black Ambulance series, entitled Black Ambulance: In Action Again. Hoaxes, Rumors, Conspiracies.