Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Dr Gábor Egry

Fellow Gábor Egry

October 2014 - March 2015
Mail: egry.gabor75(at)gmail(dot)com

Gábor Egry is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Political History, Budapest. He earned his PhD from ELTE, Budapest in 2006, since he worked as a researcher and also taught as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Miskolc and the Stradins University, Riga. He is the principal investigator of the research project Negotiating post-imperial transition. A comparative study of local transitions from Austria-Hungary to the successor states, 1918-1925 (supported by the Hungarian National Research Fund). He was earlier a Europa Fellow at the New Europe College, Institute for Advanced Study, Bucharest (2007), Bolyai János Junior Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2008-2010) and post-doctoral fellow supported by the Hungarian National Research Fund (2011-2013). He was an editor of the weekly A Hét between 2005 and 2007 and regularly contributes op-ed articles to Visegrad Insight.

Research project at the Kolleg

The project aims at the study of certain aspects of nationalism, like the phenomena of everyday ethnicity, national indifference, regional consciousness and politics of identity in interwar Romania and Czechoslovakia. How far and which way discourses on national identity were reflected in, overlapped with and contradicted to everyday experiences and individual identifications, and how was the latter connected to politics of identity and its discourses? The book attempts to show, with the help of sources from the local and county administration, police organs, specialized government agencies and personal documents the norms and expectations attached to ethnicity and the models of adaptation, negotiation, challenging and subversion individuals or local communities employed in the face of a nationalizing state. With the change of scale of analyses I hope to portray the diverse meanings of ethnicity and the practices of identification, but I also attempt to explore ethnic content of regional consciousness and how it was related to the generation of ethnic others in the form of supposed co-nationals. Furthermore, I intend to go beyond the implied dichotomy of national indifference in order to explore its situational nature and to analyze the social (class) aspect of ethnicity too. The intricate web of personal and group relations, discourses of identity and otherness, best imagined as entangled history, if bound to everyday phenomena, offers a deconstruction of the existing, macro scale narratives of the history of minorities, and a new one going beyond the oppression-oppressed dichotomies embodied by the nationalizing state and the suffering minorities, complementing it with a different view of ethnic relations.


Main areas of research

  •     Nationalism and ethnicity in East Central Europe
  •     Politics of identity
  •     History of banking and finance, economic nationalism
  •     Society and state-building at the end of WWI Funktionen
     

Positions and Memberships

  •     Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Political History, Budapest
  •     Editor in chief, Múltunk (Our Past)
  •     Member of Association for the Study of Nationalism
  •     Member of Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies
  •     Member of Arbeitskreis für Siebenbürgische Landeskunde

Monographs

(Co-author Attila Seres) Magyar levéltári források az 1930. évi romániai népszámlálás nemzetiségi adatsorainak értékeléséhez. [Hungarian docouments to te evalutaion of the 1930 census results in Romania] Kolozsvár – Cluj-Napoca, Nemzeti Kisebbségkutató Intézet – Kriterion, 2011.

Otthonosság és idegenség. Identitáspolitika és nemzetfelfogás Magyarországon a rendszerváltás óta. [Domesticity and Foreignnes. Politics of Identity and Concepts of the Nation in Hungary after the Change of Regime] Budapest, Napvilág Kiadó, 2010.

Nemzeti védgát vagy szolíd haszonszerzés?: Az erdélyi szászok pénzintézeti rendszere és szerepe a nemzeti mozgalomban (1835-1914). [Dike of the Nation or a Moderate Drive for Profit. The Finacial System of the Transylvanian Saxons and its Role in the National Movement (1835-1914).] Csíkszereda, Pro-Print Könyvkiadó, 2009.

Az erdélyiség "színeváltozása".: Kísérlet az Erdélyi Párt ideológiájának és identitáspolitikájának elemzésére 1940-1944. [Transfiguration of the Transylvanism. An Attempt to Analyse the Ideolgy and Politics of Identity of the Transylvanian Party, 1940-1944.] Budapest, Napvilág Kiadó, 2008.


Edited volumes

A Kárpát-medencei népek együttélése a 19-20. században. [Co-exsitence of nationalities in the Capathian Basin in the 19. and 20. centuries] Egry Gábor - Feitl István (Eds.) Budapest, Napvilág Kiadó, 2005.

Nemzetiségpolitika Magyarországon a két világháború között. [Minority politics in Hungary duriong the interwar era] Special issue of the review Limes, 2010/2.


Articles

Endangered by alienation? Raising a minority elite between nationalizing higher education systems: the new generation of Hungarians in interwar Romania. In Harald Heppner, Florian Bieber (eds.): Societal Evolution or Social Ruin? Universities and Elite Formation in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, 2015.

Phantom Menaces; Ethnic Categorization, Loyalty, and State Security in Interwar Romania. Hungarian Historical Review, 2014/3, 516–548.

Navigating the Straits. Changing Borders, Changing Rules and Practices of Ethnicity and Loyalty in Romania after 1918. Hungarian Historical Review, 2. (2013) 3. 449–476.

A Crossroad of Parallels. Regionalism and Nation-Building in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. (forthcoming) In Anders Blomqvist, Constantin Iordachi, Balázs Trencsényi (eds.) Hungary and Romania Beyond National Narratives: Comparisons and Entanglements. Peter Lang, Oxford-Frankfurt. 2013.

Crowding Out: Experiences of Difference, Discourses of identity and Political Mobilization in Interwar Transylvania, In Hans-Christian Maner, Sorin Radu. (eds.), Parliamentarism in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe during the Interwar Period (1919-1939). Special issue of Studia Universitatis Cibiniensis. Series Historica. 2012.202-226

Strangers of Our Own: "Nation", "Republic" and "Ordinary People" in Hungary after 1989. In Heino Nyyssönen and Mari Vares (eds.): Nations and Their Others: Finland and Hungary in Comparison. East-West Books, Helsinki, 2012., 177-210.

Minority Elite, Continuity and Identity Politics in Northern Tarnsylvania: the Case of the Transylvanian Party. In Cultural Dimensions of Elite Formation in Modern Transylvania(1850-1950), Viktor Karády, Zsuzsanna Török eds., Edit. CRDE, Cluj, 2008, 186–215.


Reviews

Review of Thomas Frühmesser, Hans Otto Roth. Biographie eines rumäniendeutschen Politikers (1890–1953) Slavic Review, 2014/3

The Last of the Revolutions? Review of Siani-Davies, Peter, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. November, 2011.

"Warsaw Express" and the Polish Disease: On the Causes and Effects of 1989 in Hungary, Poland, and Eastern Europe'. Review of Pleshakov, Konstantin, There Is No Freedom without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism and Tamas, Bernard Ivan, From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary, 1989-1994. HABSBURG, H-Net Reviews. January, 2011.

Agitátorok, szervezők, aktivisták – avagy hogyan épül a nemzet? [Agitators, organizers, activists – how a nation is biolt?]Review of Pieter M. Judson: Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006. Múltunk,LIV(2) pp. 246-254. (2009)

Ágnes Pogány / Eduard Kubů - Jan Kofman, Für eine nationale Wirtschaft. Ungarn, die Tschechoslowakei und Polen vom Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Südost-Forschungen68. 2009. 673-676.

The full list of publications can be found on the website of the Institute for Political History, Budapest