Speakers

Richard Cronin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His most recent book is Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo, which was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year.

Balázs Csizmadia holds an MA in German and English Studies from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he is currently a doctoral student in the Modern English and American Literature programme. A member of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), his main area of research activity is the fiction of Joseph Conrad, while his broader interests also include narrative theory and the fiction of early modernism. His paper on Conrad’s “The Tale” won first prize in the 2005 Hungarian National Conference of Students’ Scholarly Circles (OTDK), and he has since then published articles in The AnaChronisT, HJEAS and other journals.

Dr. Zsolt Czigányik is an Assistant Professor at ELTE University in Budapest. His research focuses on 20th century dystopian fiction, he recently defended his PhD thesis on the theme of human freedom in English dystopias. Dr. Czigányik’s publications include ‘Zippers and Freedom: Discourses of Sexuality in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (CrosSections, 2010); his current project is the study of literary censorship.

Prof. Péter Dávidházi, FHA (Fellow of the Hungarian Academy), is Professor of English Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and Head of the Department of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has also taught at the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Author of several books published in Hungary, England, and the US, including The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare: Literary Reception in Anthropological Perspective, Macmillan, 1998. His latest book is Menj, vándor: Swift sírfelirata és a hagyományrétegződés (Go, Traveller: Swift’s Epitaph and the Strata of a Tradition), Pro Pannonia, 2009. His current research focuses on the genres of vindication in 18th-century English literature and the prophetic tradition in Hungarian poetry.

Dr. Alistair Davies teaches at the University of Sussex, where he is a senior lecturer in English Literature. He specialises in the teaching of twentieth-century English literature and has written extensively on English modernist writers and on post-war British literature and culture. He is currently working on a study of the writing of the First World War.

Prof. John Drakakis is Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling. He has recently edited The Merchant of Venice for the Arden 3 series, and he is the editor of Alternative Shakespeares (1985, 2005), Shakespearean Tragedy (1992), and The New Casebook Antony and Cleopatra (1994).  He is also the general editor of the Routledge New Critical Idiom series.  He is also the general editor of the forthcoming Routledge New Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. He has published widely in the areas of Shakespeare Studies, Literary Theory, and Cultural Studies, and is the joint editor of Gothic Shakespeares (2008) in the Accents on Shakespeare series.  His Arden 3 edition of The Merchant of Venice is currently in press and will be published later this year.  He is a Fellow of the English Association and an elected member of the Academia Europaea.

Boldizsár Fejérvári holds MAs in English and Scandinavian Studies from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Currently working on his PhD dissertation on Thomas Chatterton, he is active as a translator, interpreter, and editor as well. Since 2005, he has been teaching as a junior lecturer at Pázmány Catholic University, Piliscsaba, Hungary. He is a co-editor of The AnaChronisT.

Dr. Judit Friedrich is an Associate Professor at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem), Budapest, Hungary. Her research focuses on postmodern fiction. She is currently the head of department at the Department of English Studies, School of English and American Studies, ELTE, Budapest.

Bálint Gárdos is currently teaching at the faculty of English at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). He has recently submitted his PhD dissertation on the essay as a genre in English Romanticism. He has published papers, reviews and translations in the field of the classics of the British essay in Modern Filológiai Közlemények, Liget, Jelenkor, Laokoón, and book reviews in Élet és Irodalom. His latest publication is “Hazlitt and the Common Pursuit” in the Hazlitt Review (2010). He is a co-editor of The AnaChronisT.

Dr. Gabriella Hartvig is an associate professor at the University of Pécs. She teaches eighteenth-century English and Anglo-Irish literature and reception studies. She is the author of a book on the early Hungarian reception of Laurence Sterne, Laurence Sterne Magyarországon: 1790-1860 (Budapest: Argumentum, 2000). She has also published essays in the journals The Shandean, The AnaChronist, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies and contributed to the series “The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe” on the receptions of Sterne, Ossian, and Jonathan Swift. Her more recent publications include a chapter to the volume Literary and Cultural Relations: Ireland, Hungary, and Central and Eastern Europe (Dublin: Carysfort, 2009) and a comparative analysis of Brave New World and Kazohinia in the conference volume Az utópia ezer arca (“The thousand faces of utopia”, Pécs: PTE, 2010. Web).

Andrea Hübner graduated in History, Art History and English Studies from ELTE and she completed the PhD course in Romanticism and Modernism. Presently she is writing her dissertation on Blake and Gnostic Tradition. Her main fields of interest are emblem theory, cultural studies, orientalism and postcolonial studies. Her latest publications include: “Képi hagyomány egy Blake szövegben” (in: Szó és Kép, Ikonológia és Műértelmezés JATE PRess, 2003), “Representability and Pathological Discipline” in: The AnaChronisT, 2008/2009.

Prof. Géza Kállay is Professor of Literature at the Department of English Studies at the School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Currently, he is acting head of the School, too. He is the director of studies of the MA Program in English Studies and the PhD program in Early Modern English Literature. His recent publications include Személyes jelentés [Personal Meaning, Liget, 2007], a book of essays on aesthetics and the philosophy of language, and Semmi vérjel [No Stain of Blood, Liget, 2008], a book of essays on English and Hungarian literature. He is also co-chief editor of The AnaChronisT, the annual journal of the Department of English Studies. He is writing a book on the aesthetics of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Dr. Katalin G. Kállay teaches American literature at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest and offers summer courses at the Univerity of California in Santa Cruz. She took an M.A. at L. Eötvös University in Budapest and defended her Ph.D. at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Her first book on nineteenth-century American short stories, Going Home Through Seven Paths to Nowhere: Reading Short Stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and James was published in 2003 by the Hungarian Academy of Science. Her fields of research include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, literary responses to the Holocaust and the relationship between philosophy and literature.

Dr János Kenyeres is Associate Professor and Director for Research and International Relations in the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he teaches English and Canadian literature, Canadian cinema, and literary theory. He has several publications in these fields, including a book on Northrop Frye’s works. From 2005 to 2008 he was Visiting Professor of Hungarian at the University of Toronto. He is currently president of the Central European Association for Canadian Studies, head of the Canadian Studies Centre in the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, and co-editor of The AnaChronisT.

Andrea Kirchknopf is CEU Faculty and finalising her PhD at ELTE. Her research focuses on postmodern British fiction and Cultural Studies. Her current contributions are to the emerging field of Neo-Victorian Studies, including the article "(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts" (Neo-Victorian Studies, 2008). She was awarded research grants by ERASMUS and ESSE, and is co-editor of the Department's journal of literary and cultural studies, The AnaChronisT.

Dr. Zsolt Komáromy is an assistant professor in the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His research interest is eighteenth-century and early Romantic literature and criticism. His book Figures of Memory. From the Muses to Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics is due to appear in 2011 with Bucknell University Press. He is currently working on an annotated Hungarian translation of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. He is a former holder of Békésy Postdoctoral Scholarship, one of the founding editors of the literary journal The AnaChronisT, and currently a member of the board of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English.

Géza Maráczi is a doctoral student at the Modern English and American Literature Programme of Eötvös Loránd University, where he graduated in English and Hungarian literary studies in 2008. His work centres on the rhetoric of narrative techniques that inscribe communal subjectivity and locality in the works of Dickens, Hardy and D. H. Lawrence; with the further aim of investigating the repercussions of this aspect of Dickensian narrative in fiction by two Hungarian novelists and literary journalists who claimed to have been influenced by him, Kálmán Mikszáth and Gyula Krúdy.

He has completed the Hungarian contribution to the forthcoming volume The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe and his paper on the 19th-century contexts of Dickensian influence on Hungarian literary journalism is due to appear in 2010, within the framework of the convenor Department's research project on Hungarian cultural memory.


Réka Mihálka is a doctoral candidate at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Her dissertation, “Japonism and Modernism: Ezra Pound and His Era,” will be submitted in September 2010. Her research interests include modernist poetry, translation and cultural studies. Her most recent articles are being published as “Sounds of Filial Love: Ezra Pound’s Elektra” in Roma/Amor: Ezra Pound, Rome and Love (New York: AMS Press, in press) and “The Appropriated Orientation: Whistler and Pound” in Ezra Pound: Ends and Beginnings (New York: AMS Press, forthcoming in 2010). Réka Mihálka was a Fulbright research student at New York University in 2009/10.

László Munteán is an Assistant Professor at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and a Ph.D. student in the American Studies Ph.D. program at ELTE. His research focuses on contemporary American Literature, Visual Culture, and Architectural History. Presently, he is finishing a dissertation on the memorialization of 9/11. He was a Fulbright Researcher at the University of San Francisco in 2008–2009.

Dr. Julia Paraizs received her Ph.D. from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 2010. She is currently a Research Associate in two projects funded by the Hungarian National Science Foundation. She is the editor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and King John in the canonical nineteenth-century translations of János Arany as part of the new critical edition of Arany’s Complete Works under the auspices of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She also takes part in the research project of the English Department at ELTE on cultural memory. Her research focuses on Shakespeare’s reception history at the intersection of translation and textual studies. Julia Paraizs’s most recent publications include the Hungarian contribution to the multimedia anniversary project, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Global (2009) edited by Jürgen Gutsch and Manfred Pfister.

Prof. Ágnes Péter is Professor of English at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research has been focused on the Romantic Age, its critical theory and European contexts, and on individual poets, like Keats and Shelley. Her books include Keats világa (The World of Keats, 1989), which has just come out in a second, revised edition, and Késhet a tavasz? Shelley poétikája (“Can Spring be far behind?” Shelley’s aesthetic philosophy, 2002). She translated and edited the letters of Keats. She is the director of the three-year research project (British Literature in the Hungarian Cultural Memory supported by a grant of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) which supplies the framework in which the present conference has been convened. In 1995 she founded The AnaChronisT, an English language journal in English and American Studies, which is indexed by the MLA Bibliography, ABELL and EBSCO (EPNET), and has been its Editor-in-Chief, a post which she has shared with Prof. Géza Kállay since 2006. She is vice-president of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English.

Dr. Éva Péteri is a senior lecturer at the Deparment of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research focuses on Victorian art and literature, especially the Pre-Raphaelites. Her publications on the connection between Pre-Raphaelite and Hungarian art and culture include “Pre-Raphaelitism in Hungary” (in Thomas Tobin, ed, Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism, SUNY Press, 2004), “The Hungarian Holy Crown n Burne-Jones’s Avalon” (Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 2005), “Morris’s ‘A King’s Lesson’: A Hungarian Perspective” (The Journal of William Morris Studies, 2009) and “A viktoriánus kulturális örökség Gulácsy Lajos művészetében” [The Victorian Cultural Heritage in the Art of Lajos Gulácsy] (to be published in 2010).

Dr. Natália Pikli is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research focuses on aspects of Shakespeare and the carnival, early modern popular culture, and the Hungarian reception of Shakespeare with regard to the theory of cultural memory. Dr. Pikli’s recent publications include Across Cultures: Shakespeare and the Carnivalesque Shrew (forthcoming in EJES14.3/European Journal of English Studies/).

Dr. Eglantina Remport has recently completed her PhD at Queen's University Belfast and is currently lecturing at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. She is a former holder of the Hungarian Scholarship Board Award at University College Dublin and of theGovernment of Northern Ireland Scholarship at Queen's University Belfast. Her research interests focus on modern Irish Literature, in particular the period from the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. She is currently working on a monograph on the drama of Lady Augusta Gregory, co-founder and playwright of the Irish National Theatre.

Dr Veronika Ruttkay is a full-time associate lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She earned her PhD in 2007 at the University of Glasgow with a dissertation on S. T. Coleridge’s Shakespearean criticism. She has published articles mainly on Coleridge and British and Hungarian Romanticism. She is a member of the editorial board of The AnaChronisT at Eötvös Loránd University. Her current research project focuses on Coleridge and the anatomy of the mind, funded by a Magyary Zoltán Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Veronika Schandl graduated from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 1999, where she has been teaching ever since. She obtained her PhD at ELTE, in 2006. Her dissertation dealt with Socialist productions of Shakespeare’s problem comedies. In 2007 she received a research grant from Notre Dame University, Indiana and was the Fulbright visiting professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her recent book entitled Shakespeare’s Plays on the Stages of Late Kádárist Hungary – Shakespeare Behind the Iron Curtain (Lewinston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008 ISBN: 13: 978-0-7734-4746-2) was published in 2009. She is a member of most European Shakespeare research organisations and is on the editorial board of the Brno Studies in English. Currently she is working on two projects: on a Hungarian volume discussing the Kádár-regime reception of Shakespeare in Hungary and on literary censorship in Hungary of the 1980s.

Dr. Elinor Shaffer, FBA (Fellow of the British Academy), is Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is author of ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature and Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler as Painter, Photographer and Art Critic, and numerous articles on Romanticism. She is Director of the Research Project on the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, which has published nineteen volumes to date, the most recent being The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe. She is co-editing with Thomas F. Glick The Cultural Reception of Darwin in Europe. As Director of the British Academy Network on Reception Studies, she is preparing a volume on theory and practice in reception studies.

Prof. Ronald Soetaert is a full time Professor at Ghent University. His research focuses on education (art, languages, literature), rhetoric, media, literacy and culture. Recently he wrote a book on the culture of reading a chapter in a book on computer games (published in Dutch) and (as far as the theme of the conference is concerned) he co-authored an article on ‘the rhetorical construction of the nation in education (in the Journal of Curriculum Studies). In the near future (summer 2011) he organizes a Summer School on Cultural Studies, Literacy & Education.

Dr. Andrea Timár is a lecturer at the English Department of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She holds MAs in French and English. Her PhD research focused on the discourses of Bildung, addiction and habit in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She spent part of her doctoral years at KULeuven in Belgium, and at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her publications include “Re-Reading Culture and Addiction: Coleridge’s Writings and Walter Benjamin’s Analysis of Modernity and the Addict” (Critical Engagements, 2.2 Autumn/Winter 2008. 210-231), articles on Coleridge, on Kant, and on critical theory, as well as translations of Pascal, Descartes, and Coleridge. She teaches literary theory, 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century British Literature, and is a co-editor of The AnaChronisT.

Dr. Benedek Péter Tóta is an Associate Professor at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba, Hungary. His research focuses on poetry in and after modernism. The list of Dr. Tóta’s publications is available here.

Veronika Végh holds MAs in English and Hungarian Language and Literature from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She is currently a doctoral student specialising in Romanticism, her research focuses on the Romantic fragment.

Dr Andrea Velich is presently an associate professor/reader at ELTE SEAS/DES lecturing on British History and running B.A., M.A. and Ph.D seminars on Medieval and Renaissance England and London and recently focusing on Social, Cultural and Visual representation in her courses on „Tudor films“ and British Contemporary Society in British Art Movies. She studied at Merton College, Oxford and at the University of London, had a junior fellowship at the Warburg Institute, London and Collegium Budapest, defended her Ph.D. in 2002 at ELTE on Early Tudor London, had a part-time job at the University of Düsseldorf between 2000–2003,since then she has a tenured job at ELTE SEAS.

Máté Vince started his PhD at the Department of English Studies, ELTE, and then transferred to the University of Warwick. His thesis will explore the ways in which attitudes to ambiguity were formed in Early Modern England, with a focus on the development of ideas about ‘Jesuitical Equivocation’: from their origins in classical rhetoric and logic to their occurrence in public discourse and early 17th century literature. He published articles on Roman Literature and Shakespeare (in The AnaChronisT, Literatura, Ókor, Buksz), and book reviews in Élet és Irodalom. He is a co-editor The AnaChronist.