Biography

I was born in Sopron, Hungary, on 9 January 1975. Following my interest in languages and humanities, I obtained a high-school leaving certificate from the Balatonalmádi Dual Language (English-Hungarian) Grammar School in 1994.
I studied three major subjects at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary): history, sociology and English language and literature. In 2002, I accomplished the M. Phil-course of the Department of Social and Political Science of the University of Cambridge.

I joined the Department of Eastern European Studies of ELTE in September 2003 as an assistant professor. I have taught courses on the history of Stalinism; the postwar history of Eastern Europe; attempts to reform the planned economies of the region, and on the late socialist period; the Eastern European changes of regimes and postsocialist transformation. I have defended my dissertation entitled Alienating Labor: Workers on the Road from Socialism to Capitalism in East Germany and Hungary (1968-1989) in 2007. The dissertation examines the relationship between the workers and the party-state through two factory case studies (Carl Zeiss Jena, Germany and Rába, Gyor, Hungary) and it seeks to show that the social decline of the regimes started well before their actual political collapse.

My ambition is to pursue an academic career and to contribute to the process of the re-thinking of national histories in Eastern Europe as a scholar and a teacher in university education.