The CEU Democracy Institute’s Democracy in History Workgroup launched a public lecture series to bring together international as well as local scholars of history and related fields in Budapest as well as online to exchange their results on the interplay between democracy and histor(iograph)y in a broad sense. The series’ title honors the legacy of historian Jenő Szűcs, an advocate of recognizing Central Europe as a historical region and a major critic of the misuses of national past in his native Hungary.
Zoom link will be sent to registered participants, please register here by May 20.
Abstract:
If a historian “once attempts to explain what happened to us here in the Carpathian Basin, in the half century between 1940 and 1990 (and our history never before had such an intense period), then this historian must first understand Hanák”– emphasized László Varga in his obituary on Péter Hanák (1921–1997). The founder of the CEU History Department Péter Hanák was not only an eminent historian of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and a legendary teacher, but a nationally known public intellectual who dealt with the past of the Danube region. Similarly to one of his heroes called Oszkár Jászi, Hanák was also “a patriot of the Danube” who wanted to answer the questions of Central Europe’s history in order to understand his own fate. The lecture of Péter Csunderlik, the author of the intellectual biography of Péter Hanák (published in 2023), will provide an introduction into the hectic life, successful career and inspiring historical work of one of the “founding fathers” of CEU – and one of the main advocates with Jenő Szűcs of “the idea of Central Europe”.
Speaker:
Péter Csunderlik, Phd (1985) is a Hungarian historian, assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), research fellow at Institute of Political History (Budapest), and Junior Joint Budapest Fellow at IAS CEU (January–June 2024). Csunderlik wrote his doctoral dissertation on the history of the atheist, left-wing radical student group „Galilei Kör” (Galileo Circle) (1908–1919), and he received his PhD degree in 2016 at Eötvös Loránd University, where he have been teaching since 2017. He is particularly interested in the history of left- and right-wing radical movements at the turn of 20th Century, in the history and remembrance of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, and in the history of the United States in the 20th Century. In 2023 he was SUSI scholar at the University of Delaware by the grant of the US State Department. He is the author of academic monographs on the history and memory of the Galileo Circle and the Hungarian Soviet Republic, his latest book is a biography of the Hungarian historian Péter Hanák (1921–1997), one of the “founding fathers” of the Central European University (CEU).