Eszter Balázs
Education: MA in Hitory and French Language and Literature (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Faculty of Arts), PhD in History (joint programme of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and EHESS, Paris)
Research interests: History of the First World War, Cultural History of Hungary and Europe (19th-20th centuries), History of Hungarian and European Intellectuals (19th-20th centuries), Media History, Social history of Literature and the Fine Arts
Publication list: see mtmt
Contact: balazs.eszter@uni-nke.hu
Eszter Balázs is a historian. After completing a joint doctoral program at the EHESS Paris and in ELTE Budapest (co-tutelle), she defended her doctoral thesis in French at the EHESS in 2008. The thesis is on the intellectual image and public debates of the Hungarian literary journal called Nyugat (West) concerning the period before World War I. She started her career as a historian at the Institute of Political History in Budapest (2003-2009) Between 2009 and 2022 she taught at the Department of Communication and Media Studies of the Kodolányi János College (since 2019 it is recognized as a university) as a senior lecturer and then as an associate professor. While teaching, her specialization was media history, history of Europe and contemporary media and society issues.
Between 2014 and 2018, she was awarded a Bolyai János Research Fellowship by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to research the polemics among Hungarian intellectuals’ communities during World War I. She was awarded in 2019 a Bolyai János Research Certificate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences upon the completion of this work. Between 2017 and 2022, she led the research team of the Kassák Museum on Lajos Kassák's avant-garde journals as multimedia platforms, 1915-1928 (NKFI project No. K-120779). The project explored Kassák's Central European connections and avant-garde interactions in the region. She has published two monographic books, one co-authored book, five edited volumes of essays and more than 60 academic publications in Hungarian and international academic journals (including….) and volumes in Hungarian, English, French and Czech. Recently she published Between Mars and Apollo. Writers and other Intellectuals in the First World War. Since July 2022, she is a Senior Research Fellow at the Eötvös József Research Centre for Central Europe of the National University of Public Service (Budapest).
Selected publications:
1. Mars és Apolló közt. Írók és más értelmiségiek az első világháborúban [Between Mars and Apollo. Writers and other intellectuals in the First World War]. Budapest, Petőfi Literary Museum – Kassák Museum, 2021, 286 p.
2. „Az intellektualitás vezérei”. Viták az irodalmi autonómiáról a Nyugatban és a Nyugatról [Debates on literary liberty and autonomy in the journal Nyugat, 1908-1914]. Napvilág, Budapest, 2009, 364 p.
3. Phil Casoar - Eszter Balázs: Les Héros de Budapest [The Story of an Emblematic Photograph of the Revolution of 1956] Les Arènes, Paris, 2006, 251 p. Published in Hungarian. Trans. Zsófia Molnár, Scolar - Vince, Budapest, 2016, 257 p.
4. Eszter Balázs - Clara Royer (dir.): Le Culte des Héros en Europe centrale (1880-1945), Études et travaux. Eur'ORBEM éd., Cultures et sociétés d'Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane, Paris-Sorbonne, 2019. E-book.
5. Eszter Balázs - Edit Sasvári - Pál Merse Szeredi (eds.): Art in Action: Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum (1915-1927) Avant-Garde and its Journals 3, Petőfi Literary Museum - Kassák Museum, Kassák Foundation, Budapest, 2017.
6. Stratégies mémorielles par rapport à la révolution de 1918 dans la Hongrie de l'entre-deux-guerres, Mémoires et usages de 1918 dans l'Europe médiane, sous la dir. d'Antoine Mares, Paris, Institut d'études slaves, Coll. historique Institut d'études slaves LVII, 2020, 59-76.
7. Entre débat et combat. Pratiques et représentations du du duel chez les écrivains de la revue moderniste Nyugat au début du XXe siècle. In Eszter Balázs - Clara Royer (dir.): Le Culte des Héros en Europe centrale (1880-1945). Études et travaux. Eur'ORBEM éd., Cultures et sociétés d'Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane, Paris-Sorbonne (e-book), 2019, 229-270.
8. The Image of the Jewish Soldier-Intellectual in Past and Future, the Hungarian Review Promoting Jewish Cultural Renaissance (1914-1918): Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe: The Remembrance of World War I from a Jewish Perspective, Böhlau Verlag, Vienna, 2019, 121-144.
9 The Intellectual's Body in War: Hungarian Writers' Cases in World War I. In Tomasz Pudłocki - Kamil Ruszała (eds.): Intellectuals and World War I. A Central European Perspective, Krakow, Jagiellonian University Press, 2018, 93-110.