Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Dr Sándor Horváth

Fellow Sándor Horváth

December 2013 - March 2014
Mail: sandor.horvath34(at)gmail(dot)com

Sándor Horváth is a senior research fellow and head of the Department for Contemporary History at the Institute of History in the Research Centre for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has been a lecturer in the PhD programme "Social and Economic History" at Budapest's ELTE University since 2006. He has been leader of the projects "Memory of Everyday Collaboration with the Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe" (funded by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity) and "Collaboration during the Communist regime" (funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) since 2012. He is also the editor of the quarterly journal The Hungarian Historical Review (www.hunghist.org). Horváth has been the recipient of several prizes and fellowships, including the Péter Hanák Prize (2001); a fellowship at Columbia University, New York (2007); a Mellon fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna (2009); a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) (2011), and at the Institute for East European Studies at the freie Universität Berlin (2012).

Research project at the Kolleg

Focusing on individual experiences and life histories, the project will consider why and how citizens decided to accommodate to or cooperate with the authorities under communist dictatorships. During his stay at the Imre Kertész Kolleg, Sándor Horváth will work on his book project "Parallel Lives: Comparing Biographies of Cooperation with Communist Dictatorships". The project compares the biographies of two former secret agents of the communist regimes in Hungary and in the GDR who were also regarded as 'collaborators' with the Arrow Cross and/or Nazi regime during World War II. By taking a comparative approach and focussing on the micro-historical, the project will offer great insights into how processes of cooperation played out in different societies, and how these societies created new definitions of everyday political participation.


Main areas of research

  •     The history of everyday life and the social and cultural history of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe
  •     Urban history, socialist cities, migration
  •     Social policy and welfare
  •     Collaboration, political participation

Positions and Memberships

  •     Member of the European Urban History Association
  •     Member of the European Network of Contemporary History
  •     Member of the International Association for Southeast European Anthropology
  •     Member of the International Planning History Society

Monographs


Két emelet boldogság. Mindennapi szociálpolitika Budapesten a Kádár-korban [Two Floors of Happiness. The Everyday Practice of Social Policy in Budapest during the Kádár Era]. Budapest, 2012.
Kádár gyermekei: generációs konfliktusok a hatvanas években [Children of Kádár: Generational Conflicts in the 1960s]. Budapest, 2009.
A kapu és a határ: mindennapi Sztálinváros [The Gate and the Border: Everyday Stalintown]. Budapest, 2004.
 

Edited Volumes

Mindennapok Rákosi és Kádár korában [Everyday Life in the Rákosi and Kádár Eras]. Sándor Horváth (ed.). Budapest, 2008.
Munkástörténet és munkásantropológia. [Labour History and Anthropology] Sándor Horváth, László Pethő and Eszter Zsófia Tóth (eds.). Budapest, 2003.
 

Articles

Aping the West in Hungary: 'Fridge Socialism' and the Making of the 'Teenager', in: Oliver Kühschelm, Franz X. Eder, Hannes Siegrist (eds.), Konsum und Nation: Zur Geschichte nationalisierender Inszenierungen in der Produktkommunikation. Bielefeld 2012, 279-302.
"'Wild West,' 'Gangster,' and 'Desperado' Feelings: the Perception of the 'West' in Youth Subcultures in Hungary in the 1960s", in: East Central Europe 38 (2011), 180-198.
"Patchwork Identities and Folk Devils. Youth Subcultures and Gangs in the Socialist Hungary", in: Social History 34 (2009), 163-183.
"Myths of the Great Tree Gang: Constructing Urban Spaces and Youth Culture in the 'Socialist' Budapest", in: Richard Rodger and Joanna Herbert (eds.), Testimonies of the City. Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World. Aldershot 2007, 73-93.
"Pubs and 'Hooligans' in a Socialist City in Hungary: the Public Sphere and Youth in Stalintown" (Chapter VI), in: Axel Schildt and Siegfried Detlef (eds.), European Cities, Youth and the Public Sphere in the Twentieth Century. Aldershot 2005, 80-89.
"Everyday Life in the First Hungarian Socialist City", in: International Labor and Working-Class History (Cambridge Journals) 68 (2005), 24-46.
"Urbanisation socialiste: conflits culturels et outils de politique symbolique dans la premiere cité socialiste de Hongrie", in: La Nouvelle Alternative 20 (2005), 137-158.
"Alltag in Sztálinváros. Die 'Zivilisierten' und die 'Wilden' in der ersten sozialistischen Stadt Ungarns", in: Christiane Brenner and Peter Heumos (eds.), Sozialgeschichtliche Kommunismusforschung. Tschechoslowakei, Polen, Ungarn und DDR 1948-1968. Munich 2005, 505-526.

Reviews

Mark Pittaway, The Workers' State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944-1958. Reviewed by Sándor Horváth. The Hungarian Historical Review 2, no. 3 (2013), 682-691 (www.hunghist.org).
Über Spitzel und Kollaborateure, in: Spiegelungen - Zeitschrift für Deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas 61, no. 7 (2012), 408-411.

For more information on Sándor Horváth and the full list of his publications, please visit the website of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences