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, musical and oral traditions. Dr Biernaczky is the author and editor of twelve volumes, approximately two hundred studies, hundreds of lexicon entries and book reviews.
JÁNOS BRENNER earned his diploma in architecture at the Dresden Institute of Technology in 1976 before obtaining his PhD at the Technical University of Budapest (1997). In 1984, he earned the degree of construction assessor after examination by the Higher Public Technical Service Examination Authority in Frankfurt. In 2008, he became honorary professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. From 1993 to 2019, he worked as a civil servant in the German Federal Ministry responsible for urban and spatial development. At present, he is an urban planner in Berlin, Germany.
JODY JENSEN is director of the Polányi Centre, at the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK); associate professor and head of the MA Programme in International Studies, University of Pannonia in Kőszeg, where she was awarded a Jean Monnet Chair for European Solidarity and Social Cohesion (ESSCO). She is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is director of international relations at the Institute of Social and European Studies (a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence) which she helped to found. She was also the national and regional director of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public that supports social entrepreneurs. She teaches frequently abroad and also works for the European Commission. Her areas of research are globalization, prefigurative, and subterranean politics about new social and political movements, particularly in East and Central Europe, and the Balkans. She is also very interested in the transformation of education and the social sciences in response to global challenges.
RAY KINSELLA received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin. He began his career as an economist in the Central Bank of Ireland and worked as an Economic Adviser in the Department of Industry and Trade. He was appointed Professor of Financial Services at the University of Ulster, and subsequently returned to Dublin to the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business. He has written and published extensively and is co-author with Dr Maurice Kinsella of Troikanomics: Autonomy, Austerity and Existential Crisis in the European Union (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
FRANK KOSZORUS, JR. is an attorney and foreign policy and business consultant in Washington, DC. He has lectured on foreign policy, security, human, and minority rights, focusing on Central and East Europe. Mr Koszorus has testified before several congressional committees and the Helsinki Commission. He has written position papers, chapters, articles, and letters to the editor. As a member of a Department of Defense and Department of State fact-finding mission, Mr Koszorus travelled to NATO headquarters and to countries aspiring to join NATO. He was appointed a public member of the US delegation to the Paris Meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe on the Human Dimension. He was an Honorary Board Member of the NATO Summit 50th Anniversary Host Committee in Washington, DC. He was a founder of the Committee for Danubian Research and the Hungarian American Coalition. He served as National President of the American Hungarian Federation and as a pro bono attorney of the International Human Rights Group.
JÁNOS MARTONYI, university professor (University of Szeged; ELTE University, Budapest; College of Europe in 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 privatization (1989–1990); State Secretary in the Ministry of International Economic Relations (1990–1991); State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1991–1994); managing partner at the law firm Martonyi and Kajtár, Baker & McKenzie, Budapest (1994–1998, 2002–2009); Head of the Institute for Private International Law and International Trade Law at the University of Szeged (1999–2009); Minister for Foreign Affairs of Hungary (1998–2002, 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 Corvin Chain Award for Merit, 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.
FERENC MISZLIVETZ is the founder and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK), a Jean Monnet professor and full professor at the University of Pannonia. He is a scientific adviser at the Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Political Science, at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He elaborated the project on creative cities and sustainable regions embedded in the KRAFT Centre at iASK. His research interests include democracy, civil society, Central European and European Studies, globalization, and sustainability. He has taught and conducted research at various universities in Europe and the United States, including the University of Bologna and Columbia University in New York. He is the founder and director of the board of the Institute for Social and European Studies Foundation (a Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence). Since 2012, he has served as the president of the social sciences unit of the Hungarian UNESCO Committee and holds a UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Sustainability in Kőszeg. He has received numerous awards, including the Knight’s Cross of the Hungarian Republic (2005).
EDITH OLTAY is a political scientist who received her MA in Political Science with Sociology and Philosophy as minors, 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.
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 eighteen 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 systemic change of 1989. His essay- length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for twenty 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).
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).
JOCK STEIN is a retired Church of Scotland minister, who has recently completed a PhD at Glasgow University, with a thesis on Temple and Tartan: Scotland and the Psalms and a creative writing project which involved writing poetry on all the Old Testament Psalms. He has written two books of poetry and conversation on parts of the Old Testament, available at https://buy.sanctusmedia.com/ store/collections/handsel-press-store.
HEDVIG TALLIÁN is a freelance journalist and radio presenter specializing in wine and viticulture. She received her degree in communication studies from the University of Szeged, and political communication from Corvinus University of Budapest. After several years in political journalism, her attention turned to Hungarian wine culture. She spent three years in London in the wine trade, where she received an Advanced Certificate from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. After returning to her homeland, her focus on Tokaj intensified specializing in István Szepsy’s professional activity. She has also published a book on winemaker Ferenc Takler and his family of the Szekszárd wine region. Currently, she is working on her podcast channel focusing on Hungarian history, tradition, and wine.
TIBOR VÁRADY is a professor of law. He received his law degrees in Belgrade (JD and LLM) and at Harvard (SJD). He taught for almost three decades at the Novi Sad University School of Law, and for a number of years he was editor and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Új Symposion. He is member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Since 1993, he has been teaching at the Central European University in Budapest. He also taught at several American universities (University of Florida, Berkeley, Cornell, and Emory). He became a tenured Professor at Emory University, Atlanta, and since 2011, he has been professor emeritus at Emory. Since 2015, he has also been a professor emeritus at the Central European University, Budapest, as well. In legal practice, he acted as international arbitrator in about two hundred and fifty cases, and also acted as counsel and advocate before the International Court of Justice. He has about three hundred scholarly publications in five languages. Most of his publications are devoted to various fields of international law. He also published fifteen literary books.