PÉTER ÁKOS BOD (Szigetvár, 1951) economist, university professor. He worked in economic research at the Institute of Planning, Budapest, taught economics in Budapest and in the US before 1989. He was Minister of Industry and Trade between 1990 and 1991, and Governor of the Hungarian National Bank between 1991 and 1994. In 1995–1998, he was member of the Board at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (London), representing East Central European countries. At present, he is director of the Institute of Economics at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is vice chairman of the Hungarian Economic Society, sits on editorial boards of Hungarian journals (incl. this Review). His major publications include A vállalkozó állam (Entrepreneurial State, 1987; A pénz világa (The World of Money), 2001; Gazdaságpolitika (Economic Policy), 2002; Közgazdaságtan (Economics), 2006.
JANUSZ BUGAJSKI is a foreign policy analyst based in the United States. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington DC and host of “Bugajski Hour” and “Bugajski Time”, television shows broadcast in the Balkans. Bugajski has authored 19 books on Europe, Russia and trans-Atlantic relations, and is a columnist for several media outlets. His recent books include Conflict Zones: North Caucasus and Western Balkans Compared (2014), Return of the Balkans: Challenges to European Integration and U.S. Disengagement (2013), Georgian Lessons: Conflicting Russian and Western Interests in the Wider Europe (2010), Dismantling the West: Russia’s Atlantic Agenda (2009), America’s New European Allies (2009); and Expanding Eurasia: Russia’s European Ambitions (2008).
RÉKA M. CRISTIAN is Associate Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged. She was born in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureş, Romania), graduated from József Attila University, and received her PhD in American Literature from the University of Szeged. She is the author of Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity – Essays on Literature, Film, and American Studies (2012), co-author of Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (2008) and founding and general editor of AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary and its AMERICANA eBooks division.
GÉZA JESZENSZKY (Budapest, 1941): D. Phil., historian, graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. From 1976 to 2011, he taught at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at UC Santa Barbara in 1984–86, and has taught the history of international relations and of Central Europe at numerous other universities in the US and Europe. He was Foreign Minister of Hungary in the first non-Communist government (1990–94), and Ambassador to the United States of America in 1998–2002. At present, he is Hungary’s Ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway and to the Republic of Iceland. He is the author of numerous publications on history and foreign policy; his latest book in English is Post-Communist Europe and its National/Ethnic Problems (Budapest, 2009).He is an editorial adviser for Hungarian Review.
GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942), Editor-in-Chief of Hungarian Review and of Magyar Szemle, is the author of eleven collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 1970–1989. He received research and teaching fellowships from the British Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, CIES and the German Marshall Fund of the US. He taught at the University of California in Santa Barbara (1984–85) and at Emory University in Atlanta (2004–2009), and read his poetry in English widely in the US. In 1987, he was a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). In 1990–94, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister. In 2000–2005 he was an Adviser to President Ferenc Mádl. In 2012, he received Hungary’s Middle Cross with the Star and in 2005 the President’s Medal of Honour for his public and literary achievements. With Magyar Szemle, he received a Prima Prize in 2003.
VICKO MARELIĆ (London, 1983) is a freelance journalist and researcher at the University of Vienna. His PhD in history explores the Eastern Adriatic as a transnational entity in the late 19th to the mid-twentieth century. Previously he studied at King’s College London and Sciences Po, Paris. In 2013, he worked for the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna as an editorial assistant of the multilingual IWM magazine. Currently, he is writing about the borderland dynamics of Istria for the forthcoming book Ethno-Political Conflicts Between the Adriatic and the Aegean in the 1940s on behalf of the research platform Wiener Osteuropa forum.
A. WESS MITCHELL holds a MA from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he was awarded the 2004 Hopper Award for his work on American grand strategy. He is President and Co-Founder (with Larry Hirsch) of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a US foreign policy institute dedicated to the study of Central Europe. By founding the CEPA, he has sought to reinforce Central Europe’s position in US global strategy and strengthen America’s diplomatic, commercial and security relationships with key allies in the region. Mitchell is a frequent public commentator whose articles and interviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post, BBC, Gazeta Wyborcza, Der Spiegel, Harper’s Weekly, American Interest, National Interest, National Review, Orbis, and Internationale Politik, among others. He is a frequent consultant to US and European governments, and has given briefings and lectures at the Central Intelligence Agency, US State Department, Johns Hopkins SAIS University, Harvard, UC–Berkeley and elsewhere. He is member of the editorial board of International Politics Reviews in London.
ISTVÁN OROSZ (Kecskemét, 1951), is one of the most versatile Hungarian graphic artists, and in 2011 he was awarded the Kossuth Prize, Hungary’s highest distinction for the arts. His graphic works are often related to postmodernism by archaic forms, art historical references, stylistic quotations, and playful self-reflection. He has created many famous posters; he makes animation films, and is preoccupied with the art and science of optical illusions and anamorphic design. He is also concerned with the ambiguities of spatial constructions. These interests led him to write his recent book on Hans Holbein’s famous The Ambassadors and the Pharaoh, which exhibits a mastery of prose style and psychology, and also includes his own consummate poems.
NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of New College, Oxford he spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as Reader in English at the University of Pisa before returning to UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984 he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some 17 books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the “system change” of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for 20 years. HisrecentbooksareWorththeDetour: A Cultural History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, and Vienna: A Cultural History Signet (Oxford University Press). Italian edition Vienna: Ritratto di una citta (Odoya, Bologna.)
DAVID PRYCE-JONES was born in Vienna in 1936. Having read history at Oxford University, he became literary editor of the Spectator, and then a roving correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. In that capacity he had had assignments in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also covered the 1967 and 1973 wars in the Middle East and afterwards travelled widely in Arab countries. The author of ten novels, he taught creative writing for a year at the University of Iowa, and afterwards at California State College at Hayward and at the University of California at Berkeley. Among his non-fiction books are The Hungarian Revolution (1970), Unity Mitford (1972), The Closed Circle (1989) and The War That Never Was (1995). Since 1999 he has been a Senior Editor at National Review.
DAVID SATTER (Chicago, 1947) is the author of three books on Russia and the director of a documentary film. He was the Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times from 1976 to 1982. His books are: Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which is the basis of the film of the same name that won the 2013 Van Gogh Grand Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Film Festival; Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003) and It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (2011). David Satter is a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute. In May 2013, he became an adviser to Radio Liberty and in September 2013, he was accredited as a Radio Liberty correspondent in Moscow. Three months later, he was expelled from Russia becoming the first US correspondent to be expelled since the Cold War.
GEORGE SCHÖPFLIN (Budapest, 1939) has been a Member of the European Parliament for Fidesz since 2004. He graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1962, and did his postgraduate studies at the University of Bruges. He worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1963–1967) and the BBC (1967–1976). He taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London from then on, becoming Jean Monnet Professor of Politics there from 1998 to 2004. He is active in the Constitutional Affairs and Foreign Affairs Committees of the European Parliament. He is also the author of many articles and books, including Politics in Eastern Europe 1945–1992 (Blackwell, 1993), Nations, Identity, Power (Hurst, 2000). His latest book, The Dilemmas of Identity has already appeared in Hungarian as Az identitások dilemmája (Attraktor, 2004).
TRANSLATOR’S CREDIT
In our March issue we failed to indicate that Péter B. Lengyel was the translator of The Beatles and the Danube Regatta, an essay by Attila Balázs. We apologise for the oversight.