ÁGNES BERETZKY is an associate professor at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. She received her MA in History, English, and Scandinavian Studies, and a PhD in History from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her main areas of research are modern British history, British–Hungarian relations in the twentieth century, British liberalism and conservatism, modern Hungarian history in a British/American context, and Hungarian–Norwegian relations.
SZILÁRD BIERNACZKY CSc, retired associate professor, music and ethnographic researcher, Africanist, book publisher, poet, and translator. His awards include the Károly Kós Prize and the Iroko Lifetime Achievement Award. His main research areas are Hungarian, Italian, and African literature, musica and oral traditions. Dr Biernaczky is the author and editor of twelve volumes, approximately two hundred studies, hundreds of lexicon entries and book reviews.
THOMAS COOPER is a professor of American literature and translation studies at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. After completing his doctorate in comparative literature, he taught and pursued research as a fellow at the University of North Carolina, Columbia University, the University of Vienna, and the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies. A member of the executive board of the International Association for Hungarian Studies, he has published extensively on Hungarian literature and literary history, and his translations of Hungarian prose and poetry have also appeared in the two Hungarian Review anthologies, Down Fell the Statue of Goliath – Hungarian Poets and Writers on the Revolution of 1956 (2016 and 2019) and A Nation Dismembered – The 1920 Treaty of Trianon in Hungarian Poetry (2019).
ZSOLT CSUTAK graduated from the University of Szeged with a BA in Political as well as European Studies and an MA in American Studies. Currently, he is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Military Science of the National University of Public Service, Budapest. His primary research focus is on analysing the strategic changes in the security and foreign political thinking of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
JUDIT ANTÓNIA FARKAS received her degree in Hungarian and English language and literature from Eötvös Loránd University in 1997. In 2011, she completed her PhD dissertation entitled Szép könyvek kultusza. Bibliofil könyvkultúra Magyarországon, 1919– 1949 (The Cult of Fine Books. Bibliophile Book Culture in Hungary, 1919–1949). In 2007, she edited a book on the publisher and politician Ferenc B. Farkas. Recently she has published a catalogue on the children’s book illustrator Anna F. Györffy. She is presently a research fellow at Veritas Research Institute.
SAUL KELLY is Reader in International History at King’s College London. Dr Kelly specializes in British foreign policy and military history. His latest publications include Desert Dispute (Berlin: Gerlach, 2020) and Captain Gill’s Walking Stick: The True Story of theSinai Murders (London: I.B. Taurus, 2019).
GYULA KODOLÁNYI former editor-in-chief of Hungarian Review, is the author of 17 collections of poetry, scholarly and literary essays, and poetry translations. He taught English and American Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (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 United States. He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1984–1985), and at Emory University, 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 Prime Minister József Antall. In 1992–1996, he was the Vice President of the Hungária Televízió Foundation, which created 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 the journal 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 and, in 2020, the prestigious Kossuth Prize.
ZSOLT NÉMETH is a founding member of Fidesz (Hungarian Civic Party), and Member of Parliament since 1990. He studied political science at St Anthony’s College, Oxford University, as a visiting student in 1988–1989. He holds an MA in Economics and Sociology from Karl Marx (Corvinus) University of Economic Sciences, Budapest. Since 2014, he has been Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Head of the Hungarian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly to the Council of Europe. He was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee between 2002 and 2010, and Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 1998–2002 and again in 2010–2014. In 2004, he was Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament for a year. One of the main sponsors of the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities (1993), granting individual and collective rights and the right to self-government for ethnic and national minorities living in Hungary, as well as of the Act allowing non-resident Hungarians to apply for Hungarian citizenship if they are of Hungarian origin and speak the language (2010). He is also a founder of the Pro Minoritate Foundation; Honorary Chief Superintendent of the Calvinist Congregation of Transylvania; and Member of the Knight’s Order of the Johannites.
ANTHONY O’HEAR Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham, editor of the journal Philosophy, author of many books on the subject, and was formerly Government Adviser on Education and Teacher Training. He is a philosopher with a special interest in education. His areas of expertise are philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, aesthetics and culture, political philosophy and ethics, as well as educational philosophy and practice. Professor O’Hear’s publications include Beyond Evolution (Clarendon Press, 1997), After Progress (Bloomsbury, 1999), and Plato’s Children (Gordon Square, 2005).
EDITH OLTAY is a political scientist who received her MA in Political Science with Sociology and Philosophy as minor subjects, from the University of Bonn. She has researched the development of Hungarian parties since 1990 and wrote the book entitled Fidesz and the Reinvention of the Hungarian Center-Right, (Századvég, 2012, 2013) which analyses the place of Fidesz within the Hungarian party system. In recent years, the topic of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries has become the focus of her research. She is currently a PhD student at the National University of Public Service in Budapest. Her dissertation focuses on the key aspects of Hungarian kin-state policy: From Status Law to Citizenship: The Redefinition of the Hungarian Nation Concept.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN 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 organization 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 also published in Hungarian 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 18 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 more recent books are Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide; Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History; and A New Devil’s Dictionary, which updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019, he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).
DAVID A. J. REYNOLDS is a British writer, teacher, and editor who has lived and taught in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the United States, where he gained a Master’s degree in History at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. A frequent contributor to the Hungarian Review and The Technoskeptic who has also been published in other journals and magazines, Reynolds particularly focuses on modern Central European history. He is the author of Revising History in Communist Europe: Constructing Counter-Revolution in 1956 and 1968 (Anthem Press, 2020), and Within the Grace of Meaning: Essays on Hungary in the Twentieth Century (Hungarian Review, 2020).
LÁSZLÓ TRÓCSÁNYI has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2019. Professor Trócsányi graduated from the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, in 1980. He was admitted to the bar in 1985, while also working as a researcher at the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until 1988. In 1989, he became member of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of the University of Szeged. Head of Department from 2000, Professor Trócsányi also served as Director of the European Studies Centre of Szeged University (from 2004) and chief coordinator of French-language courses in European Law and of International Relations. He was visiting professor at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve (2006–2009). He served as Hungary’s Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg (2000–2004), and as Ambassador to France (2010–2014). He received the Palmas Académiques award from the French government in 1996 and the Grand Officer Class of the Order of Leopold II from Belgium in 2002.