Biography
I joined the EUI in September 2022 from Leiden University, where I was a Professor by Special Appointment of Central European Studies at the Institute for History.
I hold undergraduate degrees in History, Literature, and Linguistics from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, and MA degrees in History from the Central European University, Budapest, and in Slavonic and East European Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSES), London. During my undergraduate years, I held scholarships at Vilnius University and Vienna University. I completed my doctorate in Modern History at Oxford University under the supervision of Robert Evans in 2002 and subsequently held a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in Department II. (Lorraine Daston) and a two-year Teaching Fellowship at the University of Essex. I was the recipient of a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, a Visiting Fellowship at the National Europe Centre, University of Canberra, and the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and I also held a Residential Fellowship in the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona. Between 2009 and 2015 I was Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen. In the Spring semester of 2021/22, I was István Deák Visiting Professor in East Central European Studies at the History Department & Harriman Institute at Columbia University. In 2014 I was the recipient of the 3rd European Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2014) from the Centre of Teaching and Learning of the Central European University.
My doctoral and postdoctoral work focused on historiography, nationalism, and the problems of small cultures. My monograph Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century was published by Oxford University Press in 2010 (paperback 2013). Between 2008 and 2013 I was a core member of the ERC-funded collaborative research project Negotiating Modernity: the History of Political Thought in East-Central Europe whose leader was Balázs Trencsényi. Which resulted in the co-authored A History of Political Thought in East-Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2016 and 2018).