ISTVÁN ÁRKOSSY (Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca, 1943) is a Hungarian painter and graphic artist. He graduated at the University of Fine Arts in Clausenburg in 1966. Between 1967–1987 he was the graphic artist of the weekly literary and artistic magazine, Utunk. Since 1982 painting has been occupying a significant role in his artistic life. He is a member of the Association of Hungarian Creative Artists, the Federation of Hungarian Fine and Applied Arts Societies and the Association of Hungarian Graphic Artists. He has published numerous books and essays on Hungarian artists and has had more than 70 independent exhibitions.
FERENC HÖRCHER (Budapest, 1964) is a philosopher, intellectual historian, poet, critic, legal theorist and political analyst. His interests in philosophy include political philosophy and the philosophy of art. His interests in intellectual history include early modern political thought, early modern aesthetic thought and most recently, the history of modern Hungarian and Central European political thought. He published four volumes of poetry, all in Hungarian. He published a volume of essays on 20th century Hungarian prose writer Géza Ottlik. Besides teaching (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Eötvös Loránd University, and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków) and researching at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science, he is interested in politics, the cultural life in a comparative perspective, Catholic higher education and the socio-political organisation of the arts and science. Currently, he is Head of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the National University of Public Service, Budapest.
CLARK S. JUDGE is founder and managing director of the White House Writers Group, Inc. and an opinion journalist. He was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House. He served as speechwriter and special assistant to both President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George W. H. Bush. A Harvard MBA, he had administration assignments involving assessing the management of the government, urban policy and international economic policy before joining the White House staff. As an opinion journalist, he has written extensively on US politics, the international financial crisis, health care reform, the current state of the US, and global economies and global security issues. Among the publications in which his work has appeared are the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, National Review Online and Claremont Review of Books.
BORIS KÁLNOKY was born in 1961 in Munich and grew up in Germany, the US, Holland and France. His family left Hungary in 1947. He studied politics and history in Hamburg and went on to work at the German daily Die Welt in 1987. In 1995, he became Balkans Correspondent for Die Welt, based in Budapest, and moved on in 2004 to become Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. He is the author of Ahnenland (Munich, Droemer Verlag, 2011), a book about what happened to his family and Hungary since 1952. He returned to Budapest in 2013, still for Die Welt. He also writes for a number of other media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
ANDRÁS KOLTAY (Budapest, 1978) He received LL.M. degree in public law at the University College London in 2006, and a PhD in law from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2008. His principal research focus is freedom of speech, personality rights and media regulations. He is the author of more than 200 articles, and four monographs on comparative freedom of speech (in English: Freedom of Speech – the Unreachable Mirage. Budapest, Wolters Kluwer, 2013, and The Troubled Relationship between the Church and the State – Freedom of Expression & Freedom of Religion. Oxford, Whitelocke, 2017). Since 2017 he has been Head of Department at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Law and Political Science. In 2018 he was appointed Rector of the National University of Public Service, Budapest.
GYULA KODOLÁNYI (Budapest, 1942) Editor-in-chief of Hungarian Review is the author of sixteen 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 (1984–1985) 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 1990–1994, he served as Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. In 1992–1996 he was the Vice President of the Hungária Televízió Foundation, which created the Duna Television, a cultural satellite channel. 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. In 2015, he was Prima Primissima Prize winner in literature. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts. In 2016 he received the Janus Pannonius Prize for poetry translation.
IMRE KÓNYA (Budapest, 1947) is a politician and lawyer, who served as Interior Minister between 1993 and 1994. He received his degree from Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Law. He was one of the founders of the Independent Lawyers’ Forum (FJF) established in 1988. In 1989, at the proposal of the Forum, the Opposition Round Table was born. Between 1988 and 1996 he was the member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) being its vice-president between 1993–1994. He received various prizes including the Deák Ferenc Prize, the Adalbert Prize, and the Hungarian Order of Merit Grand Cross in 2019.
LUDGER KÜHNHARDT (Münster, 1958) is a German political scientist. Since 1997 he has been Director at the Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI), which he helped to found, and he has also been Professor of Political Science at Bonn University. Kühnhardt regularly lectures at the Catholic University of Milan (since 1997), at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna (since 2002) and at the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies in Malta (since 2007). He was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (1993) and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. (2002 and 2011). Kühnhardt has intensive political and academic consulting experience, including for the Secretary General of the Council of Europe and for the President of the European Parliament. In 2004 he was awarded the European Science Prize of the European Cultural Foundation.
LÁSZLÓ LOVÁSZY (Budapest, 1973) received his law degree in 2000 and his PhD in 2007 from the University of Szeged. In 2009 he became adviser to Ádám Kósa (MEP), the acting co-president of the Disability Intergroup in Brussels. Since 2013 he has been guest lecturer at the University of Pécs and since 2015 at the National University of Public Service in Budapest. In 2018 he was appointed Ministerial Commissioner. He is also a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. He publishes widely on the rights and challenges of persons with disabilities, as well as on education and technological innovation.
Prof. JÁNOS MARTONYI (Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca 1944) university professor (University of Szeged; Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest; College of Europe, Bruges and Natolin; Central European University, Budapest), politician, attorney, international arbitrator, author of numerous books, essays and articles primarily in the field of international trade law, competition policy and law, European integration and law, cooperation in Central Europe, global regulations and international relations. Commissioner for privatisation in 1989–1990; State Secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations in 1990–1991, State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1991–1994, managing partner at the law firm Martonyi and Kajtár, Baker & McKenzie, Budapest in 1994–1998 and 2002–2009, Head of the Institute for Private International Law and International Trade Law at the University of Szeged in 1999–2009, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Hungary in 1998–2002 and 2010–2014. Awards: the Commander’s Cross with the Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, the Széchenyi Prize, the Hungarian American Coalition 2016 Award, the Legion of Honour of France, the National Order of Merit of France and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun of Japan, as well as British, Austrian, Polish and Bulgarian state decorations.
PAUL D. MAYLE, diplomatic historian of American Foreign Policy and International Relations; author of Eureka Summit: Agreement in Principle and the Big Three at Tehran, 1943 (University of Delaware Press, 1987); Fulbright-Hays Grant recipient in India, resulting in “Gandhi and the Gita” (ERIC microfiche, 1989); contributing scholar and commentator, “Tehran Labyrinth” (2 part documentary, RTR Russia and Moriland International, 2003); National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute scholar, “War and Morality: Re-thinking the Just War Tradition in the 21st Century” (U.S. Naval Academy, 2004); visiting professor, LCC International University, Klaipeda, Lithuania (summer terms 2010 and 2011, spring semester 2013); author of articles concerning the Munich, Tehran/Yalta, and Potsdam conferences of the Second World War (Oxford Companion to International Relations, Vol. 2, 2014); Fulbright Teaching and Research Scholar, University of Debrecen, 2017; professor emeritus of history, retired after 41 years, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, Mount Vernon, Ohio.
DONALD E. MORSE (Boston, MA, 1936), Professor Emeritus of English and Rhetoric, Oakland University, Michigan, and Honorary Professor, University of Debrecen (UD), has been teaching at UD for over thirty years, including twice as Senior Fulbright Professor (1987–1989 and 1990–1992). Author and/or editor of sixteen books and over one hundred scholarly essays, he has lectured widely in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Among his books are The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American (Praeger, 2003) and, with Csilla Bertha, A Small Nation’s Contribution to the World (1993), Worlds Visible and Invisible (Colin Smythe, UK, Barnes & Noble, USA, and Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 1994). Bertha and he have translated several Hungarian plays, five of which were published in Silenced Voices: Hungarian Plays from Transylvania (Dublin, 2008). His most recent edited book is Irish Theatre in Transition from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Early Twenty-first Century (London, 2015). From 1984 to 2019, he chaired the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The University of Debrecen awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his service to Hungarian higher education and in 2006 he received the Országh László Prize. Since 2007, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN (Liverpool, 1942) is editor-at-large of National Review in New York where he served as Editor-in-Chief for ten years. He was a Special Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organisation dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Lady Thatcher. His book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (on Pope John Paul II, President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher), was published in Hungarian, too, in 2010. Until 2011, he was the Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the President of the Danube Institute, Budapest.
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 the 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. His recent books are Worth the Detour: A Cultural History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, and Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History (Signal Books / Oxford University Press). His latest work is A New Devil’s Dictionary: Lexicon for Contrarians (2016), a reformulation for our times of Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language.
DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a writer, teacher, and editor from England, who has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the US. He is the author of Revising History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968 (Anthem Press, January 2020).