GUSZTÁV BÁGER is professor emeritus at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Between 1990 and 1992, he was the Head of the Economic Policy Department of the Ministry of Finance, and in 1992, he became the Head of the International Finance Department of the Ministry of Finance. From 2003, he was the Director General of the Research Institute for the State Audit Office, then its scientific adviser. Between 2015 and 2020, he was a member of the Monetary Council of the Central Bank of Hungary.
ANIKÓ BOJTOS studied history and art history at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, between 2005 and 2011. In 2015 she started her PhD programme in history at the same institution. She is currently working on her dissertation focusing on the Hungarian master schools of painting. Her special field of interest is the wall painting of the nineteenth century and the history of art education. She has been responsible for the administration and management of the Art Collection of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since 2014.
PETER V. CZIPOTT was born in California to Hungarian émigré parents. Receiving his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of California, San Diego, he has pursued a research career in industry. He collaborated with the late California poet John M. Ridland since 2002, publishing translations of Bálint Balassi, Miklós Radnóti, Sándor Márai, Sándor Reményik, and György Faludy, as well as bilingual book-length editions of selected poems by Radnóti titled All That Still Matters at All (2014) and Márai The Withering World (2013).
ISTVÁN DARVAS, rabbi, secretary general and teacher of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary, University of Jewish Studies, Budapest. His main research area focuses on Biblical and Talmud studies and Jewish museology in the context of legal theology.
TIBOR FRANK is Emeritus Professor of History at the Department of American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Hehasbeendoing research on transatlantic migrations, international relations, imagology, historiography, modern Hungarian and Habsburg history. A Fulbright visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and UCLA (1987–90), and the University of Nevada-Reno (1990–91), he was a recurrent visiting professor at Columbia University, NY, and recipient of the Humboldt Award (Germany, 2002). Tibor Frank was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2006) and to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2013, full member 2019.
JÁNOS PÁNCZÉL HEGEDŰS, historian, obtained his PhD from Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. He taught at the Department of Political Science of the faculty, as well as at BKF (currently Metropolitan University). He is a former fellow at the Research Center of the Tamás Molnár National University of Public Administration and the editor of the periodical Miles Christi, in which he first published articles in Hungarian from authors such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck or Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. His writing focuses on the severable issues of contemporary Hungarian monarchism. In larger studies and then in a small monograph, he summarized the results of his many years of research on the 1956 performance of Prince Primate József Mindszenty 1956. War of Independence, Not Revolution (2015). At the end of the nineties, he attended the courses of Thomas Molnár in Budapest, after which he remained in contact with the professor for years. He interviewed him and wrote reviews of his recently published volumes. As a result of several years of research following the professor’s death, he sought to summarize the principles of his political philosophy. The result of his work was published in 2019 in an independent volume Bastions of Order. Principles of Thomas Molnár’s Political Philosophy, thus repaying his personal debt to his teacher.
GÉZA JESZENSZKY, historian, D.Phil. (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest). From 1976 to 2011, he taught modern history at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. In 1984–1986, he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He also taught at the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor; Pacific Lutheran University at Tacoma, WA; College of Europe, Warsaw, Poland; and Babes-Bolyai University at Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). He was Foreign Minister of Hungary in the first non-communist government (1990–1994), ambassador to the United States in 1998–2002, and to Norway and Iceland in 2011–2014. He is the author of a large number of scholarly publications and political writings, including Lost Prestige: The Changing Image of Hungary in Britain, 1894–1918 (Budapest, 1986, 1994, 2020 in Hungarian; the volume came out in English in 2020); Post-Communist Europe and Its National/Ethnic Problems (Budapest, 2005, 2009); July 1944. Deportation of the Jews of Budapest Foiled, ed., (Reno, NV: Helena History Press LLC, 2018). His book on Hungary’s relations to its neighbours in the years of the regime change (Kísérlet a trianoni trauma orvoslására. Magyarország szomszédsági politikája a rendszerváltozás éveiben) came out in 2016. He is the co-author of a book on the history of skiing in the Carpathian Basin (2016).
ZSOLT NÉMETH, 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 and 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 also parliamentary state secretary in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1998 to 2002 and again between 2010 and 2014. In 2004, he was Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament for a year. He was 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.
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. 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, and an associate editor of Hungarian Review. His latest collection of essays The Woke versus the West. Awkward Questions for a Progressive Age was published in 2020.
ILONA SÁRMÁNY-PARSONS is a Hungarian art historian based in Vienna. After earning her PhD from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, she worked at the Institute of Art History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for ten years. She also taught at the University of Debrecen, the University of Vienna, and the University of Nottingham. In 2000 she was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and from 1991 until 2015, she was Permanent Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest. Her special field is the art and architecture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph. Her book on Gustav Klimt (1987) was published in English, German, French, Czech, Russian, and Japanese, and Viennese Painting at the Turn of the Century (1991, 2nd ed. 2003) also appeared in Hungarian, English, and German. In 2015, she edited and wrote the introductory study for a volume on the art critic of the Vienna Secession (Ludwig Hevesi und seine Zeit, Wien). In 2019, she published a major study in Hungarian, Bécs művészeti élete Ferenc József korában, ahogy Hevesi Lajos látta (The Artistic Life of Vienna in the Age of Emperor Franz Joseph, through the Eyes of Ludwig Hevesi) (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó).
THOMAS B. ROBERTSON is a retired American foreign service officer who served for thirty-five years with the US Information Agency and the Department of State. He was US Ambassador to Slovenia (2004–2007). His last position was as Dean of the Leadership and Management School at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department from 2007 to 2010. Ambassador Robertson served twice at the American Embassy in Budapest, Hungary, first as Chief of the Political Section (1990–1993), then as the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) (1998–March 2001). From March until August 2001, he served in Hungary as the US Chargé d’Affaires a.i.
DAVID STARKEY served as Santa Barbara’s 2009–2011 Poet Laureate. He is founding director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, Co-editor of The California Review of Books, and the publisher and co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published eleven full-length collections of poetry with small presses—most recently Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku against the Trump Presidency (davidstarkey.net).
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 another 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.